Film: Ron Suffield (3 mins.) 

Materials: 15 foot wooden box, 'Matchbox' toy lorry, 'Dinky' toy caravan, various toy trailers, trestles, glass, dismantled cassette tape player, lighting, oil paint.  2004

A solitary caravan in the huge landscape. Photo: Doug Atfield

​The painting is a typical Essex landscape but the music, the theme to the 1958 Western "Big Country" by Jerome Moss is iconically American and designed to suggest a vast sweeping landscape. ​

The tape was suspended halfway along by an adapted model railway signal post. Photo: Doug Atfield

​The music was recorded on cassette and then unwound and glued together in a loop. The loop was then supported on pulleys as it travelled through the painting from one end to the other and back again. The box was made to fit the tape loop so the size of the box was determined by the size of the music.

The dismantled but still functioning tape player displayed in the landscape. On the green lorry is the transformer. in the orange trailer is a relay switch. Photo: Doug Atfield

The music needs to be quite loud to create the right dramatic effect. A button starts the cassette player going and a thin strip of metal joining the tape loop together creates an electrical connection as it reaches the end of the music and switches the tape player off. This took a long time to get right and to begin with it had a tendency to 'not' stop- much the annoyance of the invigilators.   

The main function of the tressles was to compensate for the wall in the gallery not being straight. Photo: Doug Atfield

Also shown in 'Da Da Da Strategies Against Marketechture' (2004), 'The Juddykes' -2007 and 'And Model' gallery, retrospective Leeds 2014.

Photo: Jason Lee

In 2014 at '& Model gallery' the trestles were dispensed with and the work was mounted directly to the wall.