Chris Meigh-Andrews

Nothing Beside Remains, Site-Specific installation,
Valletta Contemporary

The title Nothing Beside Remains is a reference to Shelley’s famous sonnet Ozymandias. Even though I work with a time-based medium, I have attempted to make a work that is in some way timeless, to invoke a time or a place from which we are absent, gone and are no more. The video presents images of a landscape without any human presence; the sea, the sun, the sky, the clouds, and those huge worn limestone formations that are the central image of the work. To me they suggested the remains of some ancient sculpture – remnants of a forgotten human civilisation. A direct connection to the last lines of Shelley’s poem:

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that Colossal Wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

The soundtrack music is Arvo Pärt’s magisterial Spiegel im Spiegel, (Mirror in the Mirror), an evocative image of infinity, in this recording elegantly performed by Leonard Roczek and Herbert Schuch

Link to Nothing Beside Remains on Vimeo.

Password: CMA