Great Walls Project - 2008,09

Working Bricks

Feng Shui Bricks

Walking through communities or urban spaces is the initial inspiration for most of my work.

Great Walls Project is an exploration created predomnantly in Beijing, based on a concept applicable to other past and present work: "every urban place, every city corner reveals common, everyday social signifiers. Discovered objects referencing 'that' specific place or situation."

It is very common to see stacks of orange bricks in Beijing. They represent both the new and expanding China as well as the old China. Terra-cotta bricks have been used for many parts of the Great Wall, and multi- dynasty hutongs. They are culturally significant, perhaps unlike any other single object in China. They are also recognized to some degree as such.

A recent discovery is that the same types of bricks are also used in India and parts of South America.

In Beijing, these handmade terra-cotta bricks simultaneously signify the new and the old: history and future, self-identity, the birth and death of community, family, employment growth and housing economics. During one walk-about, I differentiated two separate brick-pile types. I decided to call them Feng Shui Bricks and Working Bricks.

Feng Shui Bricks photography denotes brick-stacks (or individual bricks) revealing very subtle manipulation of the bricks within their piles. The workers that handle them quietly make these conscious manipulations visible; the bricks reference the activity of play and of work simultaneously.

I researched this phenomenon in-depth. There is a feng shui-like game in which workers will often alter the placements of bricks within each stack. The idea is to that the bricks are about "space" and the placement of them within the space. The workers have a passion for the bricks, a form of pride.

Working Bricks photography reveals more to what they are, stacks of bricks. In these piles, there is no attention to placement or utility of the brick.

Both photographic categories make apparent that individuals handle these bricks. Individuals that are not “just another brick”; in communism, each person is supposed to be more or less equal, or that the many will make sacrifices for the good of the country.

In the past, there has been little room for individuality in China. It could be considered that the masses, the people of China are metaphors for the bricks. Each brick with a specific purpose, even one brick, if not properly layered, could be the fall of the others.

An individual brick that is intentionally moved out of their order could be seen as heresy or in the very least un-Communistic. The brick-stacks are never found or transported on pallets, they are stacked and re-stacked by hand which reveals as much about the purpose of the bricks as they do about the people that stacked them