The winning slide

As the title suggests, on one level this work started as something quite straight forward- A guitar played by the wind. However the back story to this work inadvertently became about much more and even started an on going preocupation with expectation and failure.   

The story begins at my first art college (foundation) in 1987, myself and a couple of friends who could play the guitar started a band. We called ourselves the `Flunkies’ because all three of us failed to get accepted into another college to go onto study at degree level. The highlight of the band's career was playing the 
​end of term party in the local pub. A year later two of us finally got places at art colleges and left our small home town to study for three years. The third member of our group gave up on art education altogether because, as he said "...I wanna be a rock `n’ roll star".  In reality he went to Leeds to live with his sister and sign on the dole.

As well as my very limited musical background another influence on this work was the film soundtrack music of Ennio Morricone. The minimalist music played by the guitar was influenced by the final gun fight scene at the end of the film`The Good the Bad and the Ugly'. As with many westerns there is a synergy between the soundtrack of the movie and the landscape and it was this that I wanted to emulate. However, my guitar probably doesn’t capture the simple but intense atmosphere of the film. Instead it merely produced a slightly mechanical two string strum. ​

'Ennio Morricone's' muscial score from 'The Good the Bad and the Ugly.'  (2 mins. 8 secs)

​Despite the disappointing sound, the title of the piece - “Guitar played by the wind” – gave a very enigmatic impression. This may have contributed to this piece being shortlisted for a very prestigious show for recent graduates sponsored by British Telecom called The BT New Contemporaries. It was 1992, video was quite cumbersome and expensive, the selection process for art exhibitions at the time usually meant choosing from the thousands of submitted 35 mm. slides. I had quite a good image of the guitar so, for all the selectors knew, the “Guitar played by the wind” could have played anything from `Jimi Hendrix’ to `Cavatina’. It didn’t, instead it played ba-ding ba-ding ba-ding and after the selectors saw it first-hand at the final selection stage, the work was rejected.​​

​The BT New Contemporaries exhibition launched many successful artists’ careers but there were no prizes for `not quite’ being selected, just a short conversation from the organisers informing you of their decision (over the telephone) followed by a formal rejection letter. The next day the work was delivered back in a large van to my parent’s house where I had been living ever since my graduation. As the van driver handed back my guitar he confessed his sympathies- Not because of my failure to be selected for the career changing show but because he had trodden on the guitar and broken it in the back of the van.

​Pointlessly I tried to repair it and set about gluing it back together. I was in the lounge at the time and switched on the television. To my amazement I saw my fellow `Flunkie’ from 1987 on `Top of the Pops' playing his guitar in a band called the Wedding Present. Sitting on my parent’s sofa, back in my small home town; as I held the pieces of my broken guitar in my hands I realised he HAD ​become a rock `n’ roll star after all. 

The guitar was in a couple of local exhibitions in the 90's and although it's always been on my website (with this story accompanying it) it spent most of its life in the back of the studio collecting dust as I always associated it with failure.

​   

'Guitar played by the wind' installed in my mums garden on the washing line post.

The moment I discovered my friend had become a rock 'n' roll star

Failure became a subject that I went on to explore extensively with my work and in 2008 I made a successful application to be artist in residence with the British Antarctic survey. In my application I suggested that the Antarctic landscape, with its history of famous disastrous expeditons like those of Scott and Shackleton, had some sort of synergy with failure. Combine this with its environmental significance as the ice cap melts raising global water levels everywhere then in some way it's symbolic of mans failure generally.

I tried to personalise this theory and as part of my artistic research I took with me a folder of old rejection letters- including the one from 'BT New contemporaries'. It was burnt on an electric bar fire out on the ice.       ​

My rejection letter from 'BT New Contempraries' ... just starting to char.

...gone for ever