Graham Dolphin works across a wide range of media: film, sound, drawing, and objects. Dolphin remakes the public shrines and tributes made by fans as memorials to dead rock stars. by taking inspiration to iconic objects to the stars; a rock near the place Gram Parson's body was burned, the back door to Freddie Mercury's garden flat. using the objects fans have chosen to memorialise creates a portal to the afterlife. Fans make pilgrimages to these sites to feel a a connection with the deceased star. as with a saints relics these objects are honoured.Dolphin's interest is not in making replicas, the shrines become living artefacts constantly changing and being added to. dolphin Dolphin makes a version of them, he wants the sculptural object to become itself, not a cold copy.
these objects hold a strong emotional connection to the star and become an icon in themselves.in Dolphins work
the fan-celebrity relationships remains intact despite Dolphin’s detached, obsessive approach to art-making.
his work centres around the material fibres of an object, breaking down the façade of fame, holding a celebrity up on a pedestal gives them an illusion of being inhuman and detached from everyone else they become unreal and some ideal version of perfection, dolphin tackles this by recreating the object he can show that it can easily be reproduced and therefore is no more special than any other object.
he questions whether the objects would still hold the same meaning as the original artefact and whether there is any real connection with the star themselves,can they be reborn from an object?
these objects hold a strong emotional connection to the star and become an icon in themselves.in Dolphins work
the fan-celebrity relationships remains intact despite Dolphin’s detached, obsessive approach to art-making.
his work centres around the material fibres of an object, breaking down the façade of fame, holding a celebrity up on a pedestal gives them an illusion of being inhuman and detached from everyone else they become unreal and some ideal version of perfection, dolphin tackles this by recreating the object he can show that it can easily be reproduced and therefore is no more special than any other object.
he questions whether the objects would still hold the same meaning as the original artefact and whether there is any real connection with the star themselves,can they be reborn from an object?