Conrad Gargett 

FINALIST

‘Memento Mori.' Remember You Must Die.

The imagined location for the installation is the internal face of the dome in Boullée’s proposed Cenotaph for Newton.

Our proposal draws inspiration from the ceilings of the Islamic religious houses of worship that are built to sense the divine. This architectural tradition avoids the use of figurative images to create an experience of sheer unbelievable richness, precision and detail, using geometric patterns. Gazing up into a kaleidoscopic world of these ceilings invokes a feeling of transcendental glory.

Using a contemporary approach, we were inspired by MONA’s fascination with light and death and this is investigated within the mega-pattern. This continues the central theme of the Pharos works - the transient quality of light. This strategy pays tribute to David Walsh’s ambition to insure that his ‘last gasp will also be his last laugh’.

‘Skulls en masse’ are organised as a motif forming a series of complex geometries that create a patterned lattice extending over the entire internal surface of the Cenotaph’s dome. The non-figurative pattern making of the architectural tradition is supercharged by the latent symbolism of the skull – a signifier of death and permanence.

The collage uses imagery of a nebula as its background, and resonates with the Pharos’s fascination of the ephemeral nature of light. This scene will be punctuated by the small sun lit holes used to create Boullée’s ‘Night Effect’ on the dome; an illusion of stars in the night sky. At night when Boulleée’s ‘Day Effect’ is in operation, the mysterious glow created by an armillary sphere hanging in the centre will reveal the kaleidoscope worlds above.

This tapestry for the Pharos Wing is a smaller segment of the overall design for the dome, a glimpse of what might have been