Levitation Series

ABERDEEN IS GREY(T)

What happens when you try to humanise granite.

I started this project as a reflection on the beauty of the Aberdonian granite as people normally refer to Aberdeen as 'grey' in a not so optimistic tone. The models are a colourful metaphor, a floating idea in a grey environment. And the rest is mystery...

Reflections collected as a result of this project. Aberdeen is also:
- Silver City
- Granite City
- radioactive
- the Silver City with the golden sands
- sparkling granite
- Aberdream, Aberdoom, Abergloom 

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RESEARCH

The locations involve more or less known areas of Aberdeen which are predominantly “grey”. This means, little to no adverts or cars around, no other people, pure granite buildings. The levitation is supposed to ignite fascination with how spaces can be humanised in an unexpected way and looked at from a different perspective, upside down, sideways, vertically, horizontally etc.

Aberdeen itself is fascinating. Most of the times when I land in Aberdeen, the plane goes through 2-3 distinct layers of clouds. Cloudy is how I know Aberdeen 90% of the time.
This project aims to showcase Aberdeen the way I see it, the way it naturally exists, grey. Some people like to romanticise about how they see it a few days per year, partly sunny. Therefore initially I aimed to take the levitation pictures only on cloudy days, however it made me realise that those 2-3 thick layers of clouds I saw from the plane affected shadows almost completely and the way the environment displayed itself. This can justify why some days people talk about feeling completely displaced and dislocated from the present as the mind cannot find the normal guidelines to establish what we know as ‘reality’, cannot place the objects in space because of the lack of light to naturally cast shadows. The only conclusion I can draw is that most of the times Aberdeen is quite surreal because of the way light is projected in space along with the consistent grey hues of granite which homogenise the environment.

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Someone once said to me: 'Aberdeen is a flat patch of grey extending from the buildings to the sky in an infinite stream of greyness.'