Eldi Dundee

This was Eldi's proposal for the UEL MA group show entitled 'ONE15' for a programme called 'Sculpture in the Workplace' curated by Ann Elliott. Eldi presented these maquettes with a view to making a scaled to life version of the cage, using a real sofa, a real television set to 'white noise', a ladder stretching out from the back of the sofa and leading up through the top of the cage to the vastly high ceiling of the One Canada Square lobby. The proposal was rejected on grounds of health and safety (fear that a child might get inside the cage and climb the ladder) and on expensive 'marble floor protection/preservation' grounds (fears that the marble floor would get badly damaged/gouged/cracked by the wait of the steel cage fair enough!) but they loved the doll-sized maquettes.

The sofa/ladder/blank television/angel feather symbolism was another idea that came to Eldi fully formed. The cage came later as a stand in for the domestic setting. The sofa and ladder were a riff off the Wrestling Women paintings. Eldi wanted to make a gentleman's cabinet, covered in wrestling women wallpaper, a sofa upholstered in fabric silkscreened with the wrestling woman motif in repeat, and naked female wrestling porn playing on a beat-up telly in front of the sofa. This morphed to the sofa itself standing in for the bodies of the wrestling figures, or as a site where sexual wrestling might take place, or might have just taken place. The ladder stood for the disappearance of the wrestling figures and the inner battle between one's corporeal/carnal and transcendental/spiritual natures.