You travelled the world as an artist?
Absolutely. For a period of about 8 years, I was out of the north of Ireland for about 5 months of the year. Brendan and I covered about 27 states in the United States as well as travelling to other countries.
Initially a New York based organisation called “No longer empty” brought us over to a place called Sugar Hill with 5 other artists. We were working with sugar cubes, creating large sculptures of buildings, some of them over 6 or 7 feet tall. We would glue the sugar cubes together, carve them, to create landscapes. We built a sculpture of the New York skyline and my theatre design background was very useful, helping to develop the spatial elements of the work.
That particular project was part of highlighting a new, affordable living, housing project. The organisation worked on setting up projects in buildings which were empty. They built studios and a museum with children’s art in it, there was a small pre-school in the building as well. From that they built up community involvement, businesses would get involved and that would lead to redevelopment. And later that would lead to a regeneration of an area.
What happened after that?
We were called up by a film company in Los Angeles, and they wanted us to build structures using the sugar cube method. They had seen us in the New York Times and online, and they flew us to LA.
We built a 30 foot man with buildings around him, and the premise of that project was that if you drank one can of soda per day for all of your life you would consume 265,000 cubes of sugar in your lifetime, just from drinking that one can of soda every day
That really took off and we worked with a diabetes organisation and we travelled all over the US, going to conference centres and different types of events, all promoting care for people with Diabetes.
We travelled to Ukraine working with people who had been displaced by war. We worked with refugees and others who had been forced to leave their homes.
After that we travelled to China and worked between Beijing and Shanghai, creating work for exhibitions. We also gave lectures to students in colleges and at universities, and we worked with lots of different materials. We worked on lots of exhibitions in different venues, galleries and museums. We were developing our work all the time we were travelling using many different materials, paper, and wire.
We worked in Paris as well and a few other places. I can say that my work as an artist and a sculptor has taken me to the far flung corners of the earth and beyond. It has been very exciting.
To see Mark Revel’s work click on the links below
