WHEN THE HURLY-BURLY’S DONE, 2007

A crumpled plastic bag with loud chequered patterning of the kind seen everywhere from Paris to Karachi, from Lagos to Caracas, seems an inconsequential thing. But its very commonality gives a certain stature to what is a most unfashionable item of ‘luggage’, because luggage it has become as the 21st century refugee struggles to go onwards clutching a brightly coloured if bedraggled skein of plastic, their sole piece of baggage for personal belongings.

It is the sort of prop you might expect in a short story writer’s narrative of crime, otherwise a bag for laundry, for unused clothes stuffed into attics, or simply the nondescript utility recognised in all manner of applications. Sold like carpet in rolls from suppliers in Asia, this woven check product has a consumer base that Burberry, Scottish Tartan manufacturers and Louis Vuitton would envy.

Nearby this place of exhibition convicts were transported, the starving fled famine and steerage hopefuls took to the Titanic, all probably carrying some small bag. The baleful enormity of their collective fates is echoed in this installation with its comic book gigantism, its phoenix-like violence of bags unstitched and reassembled, its vivid colour; a lurid patchwork sculpture inhabits an elegant room and by its insistent presence, evokes reflection on those febrile efforts of the displaced person to find somewhere to put down their bag.

The idea of enlargement, of scaling-up, generally signifies a desire to give greater stature to objects. Whether it is the largest statue of Buddha in the world or the biggest pineapple, increased scale moves them beyond their everyday relations; it is a strategy embedded in the history of sculpture as much as kitsch monumentality.

Here, the high seriousness of sculpted form is conflated with the cheap grandeur of highway marketing - a bouncy castle, a beckoning figure with flapping arms – and gives status to an object otherwise ignored in its ubiquity.

By contrast, if the idea of the miniature in art such as a Pre-Raphaelite locket, Netsuke sculpture, or Mughal painting, is to hold a jewel-like cosmology in the palm of the hand, then with this work’s title Macbeth’s witches intone a post-battle landscape all too familiar in contemporary life, one populated by the disenfranchised and dispossessed holding everything they own - the small desperate threads of their private universe - in a cheap plastic bag.

Martin Sims was artist in residence at the Cité Internationale des Arts Paris in 2007, where he prepared this work before it’s installation at the Sirius Arts Centre, Cork.