Olympic Opening Ceremony

After the Opening ceremony of the Olympics 2012, I began receiving lots of messages from friends asking if I had contributed to the opening festivities. It seems the central element was a spiral mound surrounded by a pastoral landscape. A cursory look at some stills from the event seemed to show some remarkable similarities, not only conceptually but down to some of the smaller visual details, to my good friend and collaborator Dominic Heffer’s illustrations. For example, see above.

The top image is one of our postcards that showed the mound through the ages.

The image below is a mock up of the opening ceremony.

The little house being in almost the same place seems a little more than coincidental.

As struggling artists in the North of England some recognition of our hard work to bring this concept to light would have been most welcome, if indeed it did inspire the opening ceremony.

Although my proposal was to build an actual mound 40m high in the flat landscape of Holderness, East Yorkshire, it does seem that our imagery and conceptual vision has heavily influenced the theatrical opening ceremonies theme and look.

My proposal to build a neo-neolithic mound was not merely thought of for the Olympic competition, it is an idea that I have wanted to fulfill for many years. The Olympic competition was a potential vehicle to make it happen.

Again, if it inspired the producers of the opening ceremony, some recognition of my bid to create one for real could have made a huge difference in its viability.

It seems there is more to this story concerning the regional judging process of the ‘Artists taking the lead’ competition, which if true makes this situation even more troubling and disturbing to me, however I leave that to September’s issue of Arts Professional to explain.

What do you think?

UPDATE: Also see my latest blog in this matter here : Olympic Opening Ceremony Debacle goes Mainstream Media