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By Kenneth Ruxton The passion for art had been there since I was a child though I hadn’t created any works of art since I was fifteen years old, thirty-three years ago. In early 2012 I was sitting on my mother’s couch, unemployed for over a year and I decided to start creating some art work. I began to create colour pencil drawings, three a day, A3 in size, and did so for the entire year. At the end of the year I had created one thousand drawings. On seeing this collection, a family member decided to get my art appraised to see if the drawings were worth anything and if so, to get an estimated price range. I was pleasantly surprised with the outcome, the appraiser priced the A3 drawings at between 175 and 185 each. The feedback I received about my work was a great confidence boost. Around that time I began reading a book on ancient Egyptian tomb discoveries and eventually completely lost myself in it. I even went as far as using a magnifying glass to look deep into the artwork sculptures illustrated in the book. The inspiration took hold and I started to design and execute sculptures. My first project was to mould a block of plaster of Paris into a hand. I prepared the lump of gypsum but had to wait about three months for it to dry. While I waited, I honed a horse out of a rump of teak hardwood – my first wood carving. This item turned out surprisingly well for a first attempt. I decided on regular wood chisels for the wood, and sandpaper to achieve a smooth finish. I then coated it with a varnish called “itch”. When the plaster block was completely dry I began to carve it and it took about three weeks to finish. I again used wood chisels to fashion the hand and then glazed the finished limb with fibreglass resin to strengthen it, giving it a bone colour. It is called “Archaeology Dig”. At that point I decided to create a sculpture of Tutankhamun’s mask. I chose a “terracotta das air dry” modelling clay, which I mounted on a glass plate standing on a teak base. The stand of the sculpture is key to the entire design of this project. From previous experience in construction work and time spent doing architectural drawings, I was able to design and build the stand. I wanted the stand to be a strong structural feature of the sculpture piece. which is called “Sleeping Tut”. My next project was the horse’s head, also made from “das air dry” modelling clay. When this item was finished and dried I painted it with a white paint. It is called “Sleeping Beauty”. All these sculptures are my own designs and I did not use drawings or images to copy from. My technique is: prepare the plaster and then recreate the design in my head on to the plaster. I found it compelling to work on projects without a plan or drawing and to await the outcome of each creation. As a novice sculptor I did reach a point where my experience let me down, and cheap modelling clay resulted in various problems. For example – I made a base structure out of foam, copper and sculpture flexible metal. I used a metal bracket which I covered with the cheap clay, not knowing that the clay would shrink 15%. The metal and foam prevented the clay from sinking so the clay simply cracked everywhere. This was the start of the girl with the water jug sculpture. I did not give up, at this point I decided to change clay (I had an idea what the problem was due to my construction work experience).  I bought the expensive clay and it was worth every penny. I covered the entire frame and began to shape and form the piece, the water pot on her head was made separately and placed on top when she was complete. The original sculpture design was just the head and the jug on top. After it was finished I decided to give her arms to hold the pot, she was than painted white. It is called “Water Girl”. Not knowing what to do with the leftover cheap modelling clay, I had to think of something that I could sculpt without needing a wire frame, that was when I chose to create the abstract Pharaoh piece. This has no inner frame and it was created on a flat surface. It was much bigger in size when it was first shaped but duly shrank the 15%. It is called “Abstract Akanaton”. The hand with the ball is a sculpture that I created when issues of global warming were being heavily discussed. I created the ball first and sometime later added the hand. It was made using a metal bracket I got in B&Q that was angled perfectly for the hand to hold out the ball, like a snowball in a hand. It is called “Ice Age”. The final piece was created while Britain was deciding whether to change the law about altering human DNA. This subject is interesting to me since, for deep-space exploration, it would be impossible for humans to endure long flight, but it would be possible with the use of changed human DNA. Anyway… this subject inspired the creation of this last piece: an angel hugging an egg. The ball was created first and the angel was then added later, it was originally painted white. After all the individual items were created and finished I decided to paint the collection a gold colour. This turned them into an art installation piece, an abstract tomb discovery collection from ancient Egypt. It’s an artist’s abstract impressionism of “ Tuts Tomb”. • www.kennethruxton.eu This Art Sculpture installation is on public display at “The Oar House Restaurant” on the west pier Howth harbour

Frank Armstrong reviews Thedore Zeldin’s ‘The Hidden Pleasures of Mankind: a New Way of Remembering the Past and Imagining the Future’. Contemporary job insecurity is more than a byproduct of prevailing neo-Liberalism. Technological change often reduces the need for labour inputs. A serious mismatch has emerged between skills and the requirements of our economies. Only a revolution in work will allow for greater fulfilment and individual autonomy in this changed environment. Theodore Zeldin’s latest work: ‘The Hidden Pleasures of Mankind: A New Way of Remembering the Past and Imagining the Future’ offers a profound examination of the failings of contemporary corporations to offer dignified employment to their workers. He mines history for alternative responses to contemporary challenges. The book is an extension of the work of Zeldin´s non-profit Oxford Muse foundation that provides an online platform “to stimulate courage and invention in personal, professional and cultural life”. It is a forum where ideas are flashed before participants, offering a kind of intellectual Tinder. Proceeds from the book go to that project. In terms of originality and variety, Zeldin – born to Jewish-Russian parents in 1933 – is arguably the pre-eminent historian of his generation in Britain. His lack of a deserved public profile derives perhaps from his concentration on the history of France, although his ‘Intimate History of Humanity’ (1994), like this work, provided a staggering, global range of sources in his exploration of the human condition. But as well as providing a collection of portraits that yield insights into historical processes, in his latest work he looks explicitly at how contemporary societies might offer greater satisfaction for beleaguered citizens. He is a trenchant critic of large corporations and trends towards privatisation. In spite of this, Ikea allowed him to conduct research into its modus operandi which he criticises as ruthless expansionism and an inability to nurture the hidden talents of many of its workers. Zeldin yearns for an economy composed primarily of micro businesses operating at all levels of society facilitating greater communication, and a personal relationship with money as opposed to one mediated by impersonal banking institutions. Zeldin argues that individuals must overcome an inability and unwillingness to share deep thoughts, attributing this to how: “Many are schooled to believe that they need to be hypocrites. The hidden thoughts in people´s heads are the great darkness that surround us”. The utility of the historical knowledge he has accumulated over a long and impressive career is apparent: “I juxtapose people and ideas from different centuries and backgrounds so as to find new answers to the questions that perplex the Earth’s present inhabitants”. Hidden pleasures of life lie in the exchange of creative ideas that has brought satisfaction throughout history. He is also a restless soul himself. He says: “I do not wish to spend my time on earth as a bewildered tourist surrounded by strangers, on holidays from nothingness, in the dark as to when the holiday will end, stuck in the queue waiting for another dollop of ice-cream happiness”. It appears that a life of climbing the greasy academic pole accumulating honours has proved insufficiently rewarding for the author. He wonders what the great adventure of our time should be, recalling (Eurocentrically) that in the sixteenth century it was the discovery of new continents; in the seventeenth, questions of science challenged great minds; while in the eighteenth, equality was the great idea that gripped intellectually energetic individuals. Echoing from history hears a widespread contemporary concern to live less self-centred existences; or in harmony with all the earth’s creatures; or “a quest for beauty, and its appreciation in many forms”. Although good Village readers will feel equality of outcome and sustainability or even transparency are big contemporary imperatives Zeldin feels that the great idea of our time remains elusive during an epoch when more people than ever seek a purpose to their lives, and where dominant corporations offer scant reward for skill and artistry, preferring instead a form of ‘teamwork’ where orders are taken from on high. Later in the book Zeldin considers that giving new meaning to work could be the great adventure of our time: “so that it is more than the exercise of a valued skill, more than the enjoyment of collaboration with others, more than a price that has to be paid in search of security and status”. He sees work as a way to redefine freedom”. Zeldin is calling for a subtle but far-reaching evolution. Quite what this “freedom” connotes is not explicit but he favours the more haphazard arrangements that once obtained, to the formality of most work environments today, a formality that sees individuals carry masks into their daily lives. He traces the origins of the companies that now dominate the world’s resources, recalling how for over a century between 1720 and 1825, in England, during an era of seismic development, it was a criminal offence to start a company. He draws attention to how in the United States until the nineteenth century there were two competing ideas regarding the purpose of companies: the first were those with charters restricted to the pursuit of objectives in the public interest such as canal building; the other was charters of a general character allowing companies to engage in whatever business proved profitable. The latter category remains the dominant form: divorced from responsibility for fellow-citizens, it has carried all before it. Zeldin quotes Adam Smith, the founding father of modern economics, who predicted that the tedium of performing monotonous tasks would render workers: “stupid and narrow-minded. The torpor of his mind renders him not only incapable of relishing or bearing a part in rational conversation, but of conceiving generous, noble or tender sentiment; and consequently of forming any just judgment concerning even the ordinary duties of private life”. History certainly shows how many individuals have risen above their lot as unskilled workers; nonetheless a life of unceasing monotony can have disastrous effects. But was there ever, or could there ever be, his fabled ‘New