Sundown at East Cliff, West Bay. September 28 2008.
Charlie Morrissey's stunning new work for the Universal Value commission was revealed to an audience entranced by the monumentality of the landscape and lulled to silence by the sound of the sea.
Audience response included -
'A serene and contemplative work set against the magnificent backdrop of East Cliff. As the projected faces passed by, acutely detailed and sensitively observed, one was filled with a feeling of time and generation, and even of timelessness itself. Inter-cut with images of the foreshore and sea, often, and quite disruptively, delivered in reverse motion, the entire drama played out with great poignancy. However, other factors were at play. The surface of East Cliff, grand, vertical and deeply fissured, imbued a sense of optical dissonance, disturbing the otherwise poetic progression of images. Faces were scared and distorted; young skin rendered arid with smiles and features cracked by the eroded surface. East Cliff fused as one with the images and transformed them all with a dark and gently sinister undertow of impermanence. Every thing changes - everything ages, even the eternal cliff face. Initially gentle imagery was transformed with a gravitas that reflects the observational skills and sensitivity of the work's creator.'
'Amazing, a very touching display of innocence and humanism.'
'Simple, elegiac, beautiful. A melancholic summer's last kiss. Intimacy on a grand scale.'
'The West Bay event on Sunday night was truly wonderful. As a Jurassic Coast event it was fantastic - the subject matter of local people, it was about and completely harmonious with the coastal site but also monumental and wonderful in its scale. The simplicity of the projection accompanied by the sound of the sea, the lanterns on the beach and the flaming torches along under the cliff made the event really magical and as someone local to that particular bit of the coast I felt overwhelmingly privileged to live somewhere so beautiful. Walking away from the site and watching the second 'viewing' from the East pier was for me the real revelation with the image distorted to the full height of the cliff and reflected in the sea - I'd love to know if there were any fishermen watching from the sea! I felt that I really was experiencing the place in a completely new way - so the pre-requisites of site specific work were genuinely met for me.'
'Beautiful, sensitive, moving and evocative. I can't wait to see the next two parts of the trilogy.'