Sam Winston "Birth-day"

"Now what´s this" you might think? Erotic? How?

Well, I want to show this picture to illustrate that erotic art is not necessarily directly concerned with showing genitalia and sexy poses. Good art carries a lot of thought behind it and is usually based on an underlying issue, theme, problem etc. which acts as the foundation of the work.

Birthday is created by London based artist Sam Winston and is a mark of the 100,000 new babies born over a period of 12 hours on the planet. The work consists of 100,000 circles. What a feat!

The work was never intended as a piece erotic art but that is what is so great about art. Sometimes people perceive something different than what the artist had in mind at the outset.

When I wrote to Sam and said that I loved his work because the piece also can be seen to document the results of numerous erotic encounters, he responded: "when I showed Birth day to a friend she said - think how many people are having sex right now ! I guess she has a point." So obviously I am not the only one, but this is hardly surprising considering how close sex and birth are to each other.

Birthday is a beautiful pulsating image - you can almost feel all the babies that have come alive over the past 12 hours. The image has a very organic quality, there's a liquid motion resembling a certain fertilising fluid intertwined with the circular shape resembling the ovum.

This is what Sam says about his work:
"Birth-day charts the 100,000 lives that come into being over the period of 12 hours on the planet. I drew a circle for every life born in a waking day.

"I find it interesting that we use numbers to quantify things yet once we pass a certain amount, scale slips away and it becomes incomprehensible. I wanted to understand what a 100,000 physically was – and for me that entailed marking out that number in pen. I soon realised the enormity of such a task – I hoped to keep up with 100,000 births over 12 hour ratio but within the first ten minutes I knew it was useless. As two children are born every second the hand cannot mark the event. In total it took over a month to chart one day of births.

"On completion I also realised I wanted to create the works opposite number – the amount of deaths within 12 hours. These are to be black circles on white – and there will be 70,000 of them. "

All three images are Copyright of Sam Winston and reproduced with kind permission by Sam Winston.

For more on Sam Winston´s other work visit samwinston.com