Future Failings
Euan Lockie
Title: Future Failings
Date: 2019
Medium: Found and recycled materials
Artist Description:
It looks isolated, slightly derelict, banal in form and somehow both out of place and strangely at home. The work takes the form of a Department of Conservation hut with its timeless boxy aesthetic. A DOC hut is a welcome sanctuary for a weary traveller and it provides the most rudimental form of shelter. It represents urbanisation and conservation, isolation and community, past, present and future.
Lockie’s work exists in the borderland between the playful and political. He imagines a future where rising sea levels and climate change have put pay to life in Aotearoa as we know it. Given current concentrations and ongoing emissions of greenhouse gases the global mean temperature and sea levels will continue to rise, oceans will get warmer and ice caps will continue to melt. Future Failings is on one hand a fantastical cabin, barely keeping afloat and on the other is a warning: make changes, pay attention, or this is the world that our tamariki might live to see. In keeping with the theme of the artwork it is constructed from found and recycled materials, much of it sourced from Waiheke Island’s waste. The location of the work is integral: like New Zealand itself it is isolated and on the periphery. Viewed against the lush New Zealand backdrop and the surrounding waters it reminds us how beautiful our country is and exactly how much we have to lose.
Euan Lockie’s Future Failings was initially created for Sculpture on the Gulf on Waiheke island.
Bio:
Euan Lockie a New Zealand-born multidisciplinary artist who works primarily in sculpture and painting. He obtained a Bachelor of Fine Arts with first class honours from Elam School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland. Lockie has exhibited throughout Auckland as well as at the opening of the Shanghai Power Station of Art, China (2013), and has completed a month-long residency at Instinc, Singapore (2016) where he created works for his first solo international show. His work is held in various private collections throughout New Zealand.
