The Ghost of Pete Townshends Guitars 1
Cast glass (pate-de-vere), LED lights, Guitar case
The Ghost of Pete Townshends Guitars 2
Cast glass (pate-de-vere), LED lights, Guitar case
3/4 size ghost guitar
Cast glass
Back in 2010 in I submitted a piece to the Victoria & Albert Museum’s annual art competition ‘Inspired By” for people on part-time courses. The final piece that I submitted was selected and displayed for a month. They also took an edited version of the video I made, detailing the ideas, processes, research and making of The Ghosts of Pete Townshends Guitars (TGOPTG) and showed it alongside the piece.
The Ghost of Pete Townshends Guitars have had different incarnations, the first showing was at GHost in the belfry, St Johns Church in Bethnal Green in December ’09. The second being the Illumini’s Secret Subterranean London show in September 2010 and the third in V & A Inspired By show in October of the same year. The Illumini show was more of an installation piece with the 3rd version of the boxed ghosts and the 3/4 size glass guitar which I had also cast in glass.
The piece came about as I say from the competition which is to make something inspired by an object in the V & A collection. My first idea was to cast in glass the shrapnel holes on the outside of the stone building which have been left over from the 1940 blitz but then I was told that, that had already been done, so I spent a day wandering around the museum and as amazing as the collection is I didn’t see anything that fired my imagination until I went into the theatre and performance department. One of the first things I saw was Pete Townshends broken guitar, of course I knew of his ritualistic smashing of guitars at the end of his gigs but never expected to find one there. He was a student of Gustav Metzger who created Auto-Destructive Art.
I thought “A dead guitar! hmmm, What happens when you kill a guitar? Especially one that has been played with such enthusiasm, passion and energy. What happens to the soul or ghost of that guitar and how would it look? Thus the idea of the ghosts of a guitar started to come about.
Reviews Crafts Council and Evening Standard