Swedish artist
Rebecca Sharp has created the global artwork The Doormat.
The Artwork
The Doormat has identity at its core and involves nature and human interconnectedness. Making visual the relativeness of difference in the full picture of commonness, it questions if we will ever move beyond our tendency to label and separate the world around us.
Grass from every country in the world will supply as material for the creation of a doormat. This piece of work will connect the earth and the diverse connection with each locality, relating to the place, it’s people and history and geographical context, will celebrate the differences and likeness of the local, national and international.
The Doormat is the next step in Sharp’s inquiry into geopolitics and of our understanding of place and identity. This new collaborative artwork which invites people to collect grass from their local surroundings, send it to the artist to be woven into and represented within the artwork.
After each sample of grass collected, the work will slowly unfold and continually be woven.
The Doormat will come together to play out the world’s natural geography as endlessly mobile and is designed to be situated in front of a doorway and is intended to encourage us to transgress the liminal space of our imaginative and intellectual boundaries, in how we perceive The Other.
The completion of the work depends on participation, and the uncertainty if the work will ever be finished reflects the question back at us, will humanity ever reach the point of a union?
Rebecca Sharp’s poetic and conceptual projects consider our place on earth in the context of human geography, politics and the human impulse for rootedness and belonging.
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The Archive
Grass is being collected with the help of a global network of people drawn in by the idea of bringing grass from all over the world to one place.
