Mega-Steth

Tiki Mulvihill

May 2014 Lumsden Scotland

Installation, Performance, ‘Mockumentary’ Video

During a residency at Scottish Sculpture Workshop in May 2014, I wandered, hiked, biked, observed and pondered this rural paradise. One distinctive location and ‘germ of an idea’ leapt forward, resulting in Mega-Steth, a site-specific installation depicting an enormous faux fossil. The resultant fictional fabrication propagated from observations of rocks/stones consistently ingrained in the landscape, architecture and culture of Scotland. 

The fossil Mega-Steth embedded in the earth upon a steep hill within a farmer’s field.  The field’s owner, Robin Henderson, generously granted artistic access to his land normally grazed by cows. Subsequently, all ideas and manufacturing of work employed stones gathered only from the site.

After sculptural completion, a performance component emerged in the form of a tour led via pseudo-paleontologist, Dr. Constance Coy, seemingly bent on educating the public about the fossil she supposedly excavated from the land.

To conclude the project, I created a ten-minute  ‘mockumentary’ video Mega-Steth, to summarize all aspects of the dinosaur fossil, its perch just outside of the village of Lumsden, Scotland and its fictional excavator Dr. Constance Coy.

Mega-Steth Video