Being With Prometheus: Twin Flame or Bad Romance?

Originary Fire Excitement of The Machine Age Trans human Tableau Prometheus at The Quilting Bee



Above. ‘Being With Prometheus: Twin Flame or Bad Romance’ (C. Lowthian, 2020-2021)10m x 1.80m (approx.) 
A collage including sculptural and installation elements.  Found images, re-cycled metal, fabric and IT waste. Natural materials processed from the environment: charcoal, clay. Fennel seeds, loft board, ply wood, paper, foil, haberdashery notions, yarn, chain, cable ties, plumbing and electrical fixings, adhesives, hand-crafted, painted and printed elements.
 

‘Being with Prometheus: Twin Flame or Bad Romance?’ is a work composed of a sequence of panels mounted as a quadrilateral structure divided by corner installation elements.

The structure affords a range of panoramic views but never the whole. Each panel is divided into tableaux depicting creative progress in a variety of artistic, scientific and technological modes through which the presence of Prometheus and the themes and ambiguities of the myth are kept alive by the repetition of motifs—hands, fire, eagle, liver, (haruspex) fennel and forms of tethering or chain- that recur literally, symbolically or by implication, in various juxtapositions. Found images and unlikely material combinations and assemblages reinforce a sense of the extent of human artifice within the world and the species’ dependency upon entanglements of things human and things other than human through time. 


“Prometheanism is the claim that there is no predetermined limit on what we can achieve and the ways in which we can transform ourselves and the way in which we live.”

(Brassier, 2013)

“To think that the world is ours to ruin or to save are two expressions of the same hubris”

(Cohen & Duckert, 2015)