Joseph Marr: Desire is a trap

Joseph Marr (born 1979) is an Australian Artist of English/Maori heritage who lives and works in Berlin, Germany.Working in a number of media including painting, sculpture, video and photography, my art is conceptually oriented, and generally concerned with issues of consciousness. Working with sugar is wonderful and difficult. Its so colourful and textural, having similarities to paint. But then there is the temperature which is firstly dangerous but also it drops so quickly which influences the viscosity, so I find myself having to work really quickly to get what I need. Its a sensory overload, the smell, the colour, the heat and the honey like movement… its sharp like glass and smooth like Marble and at the same time rough like concrete… unpredictable. I chose to portray DESIRE as a person to use a more social context. The topic is more cosmic than just desire or lust between people. The way the Hindu’s say it was my inspiration to work with sugar: “Desire is a Trap” Desire is the creator and destroyer, and to live without Desire is to be liberated. The traps in life are the attachments we form to everything, such as Money, Power, Fame, Love, Happiness… anything we desire. If we only want to live a happy life then we are attached to happiness and  deny sadness or struggle or anything that is not happiness. We live as if all that other stuff should somehow not be there, which denies the flow of life being the organic process that it is. With the sculptures I am looking to show the attachment predicament that we live with. You work all your life for in pursuit of riches and if you get it, you can’t take it with you when you die, and if you don’t get it you have struggled in vain. Any example you want to take fits the predicament. We are spending our lives trying to get get get, and have have have… but what for? all this time we could have been enjoying ourselves with much less worry. So the sugar symbolises this big DESIRE PREDICAMENT, and the form that it takes is up to you. Sugar itself has so much to it, its a sensual thing we suck on like a drug each day, its an energy source, its a life source in everything. Plants are all converting light into energies such as sugars in the photosynthesis process. Astronomers have discovered simple sugar molecules floating in the gas around a star some 400 light-years away, suggesting the possibility of life on other planets. The list goes on giving me ideas in every direction to make sculptures with sugar as the medium.