‘One Hundred’ Art Installation 2021

Art Installation - construction and deconstruction.

In late 2020, the artist, Rupert Baker, working with Cornwall Social Services, gathered ‘One Hundred’ returned, and no longer required, walking aids, from care homes, during the first wave of the global C19 pandemic. This first wave took away the lives of 40,000 care home residents, attributing to half the UK reported deaths.

This series of works, of which ‘One Hundred’ is the final piece, examines the impact of the covid-19 pandemic on the UK social care system; that even before it struck, lacked staff, resources, finance, and recognition. In this installation, one hundred aids have been used, as a symbolic and celebrated number for age achievement, all strapped together, that appear from the distance, as an organized, linear, orderly cube, but close-up a pained and confusing intimacy.

This invisible number or statistic, that purposely distances the viewer from the humanity of the individual that has been left and abandoned, masked in anonymity – reported daily on our television screens as just a number.

Many of these individual aids have personal markings or name tags, with each telling a very personal and intimate story, that collectively exudes a powerful energy presented on the platform of Long Rock beach as a symbol for our own fragility and lifecycle.

These intact aluminium walking aids, that are held together by plastic cable ties, as if huddled awaiting their fate. This is an unstable and precarious structure, slowly waiting for the tide to arbitrarily keep all together or pull all apart, either way, each fighting for breath as the tide slowly rises, but ultimately released to the universe from a discarded social care system, the fear of contamination and confinement, and deprived of many basic human needs.

The sources of Bakers’ work derive from his experiences at Barclays Capital Markets at the height of the Thatcher era. Witnessing products and services that conflicted with his own value structure, highlighted by the ethical influence that multinationals contribute to society; powerful enough to cross moral and geographical boundaries, in the pursuit of pure profit. This sculpture, constructed and de-constructed at Long Rock beach, reinforces and continues to reflect the artists’ themes of, pained detachment, restraint, and claustrophobia, common to most of his work.