Shifts and Expedients

This apparatus is an improvised balance. A stick covered in cloth, a hook, pivot and a bronze weight. What is in the balance? A 3D print of an abducted gourd vessel, a shabby ill-made pair of trousers. Keeping the balance depends on keeping the items apart. As a viewer moves, air currents cause the apparatus to rotate and shudder, destabilsing the equilibrium.

The piece is remade and reconfigured in each iteration.

Variable materials:
bioplastic prints -corn cob, cacao pod and peanuts, bronze, copper, pivot, bean bags and clothing sewn from plant-dyed cloth. Mugwort and sticks from Burgess Park, Southwark, London.

Watercolour of a Quagga, from the series Extinct, 2009
3D print from a scan of Catalogue Number: 54663. 75.00 CUCURBITACEAE Lagenaria siceraria: a beer ladle made from a gourd collected by artist Thomas Baines in Zimbabwe
and now in the Economic Botany Collection at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew.

In 1858 Baines accompanied David Livingstone on his expedition along the Zambezi.
In 1869 he led a gold-prospecting expedition to Mashonaland.
He died in Durban in 1875 aged 54.

Latitude 19°42´10” South

08-Aug John Fontein shot a quagga, the meat was slightly strong. Jan Vrei had worn the same trousers from Maritzburg, but there were no spare, so Baines cut out a piece of duck and by evening they were completed.
25-Oct Trekked early before halting at Biles’ Pool to fill water casks and cut a log of baobab wood for Kew and other museums.

21-Nov Inyassi begs for some trousers, but as there are none, Baines cuts out a piece of duck for him and by the afternoon he has the trousers.

From: The northern goldfields diaries of Thomas Baines, edited by J. P. R. Wallis, London,
Chatto & Windus, 1946

• https://ifrepo.world/Detail/projects/41
• https://artgallery.uleth.ca/mootookakios...
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• https://www.kew.org/science/collections-...
• https://artslondon.padlet.org/lminkin/pr...
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