26Aug
Guy Portelli: Festival Hands Mosaic 2025Guy ‘launched’ his latest sculpture to coincide with Ray Foulk’s launch of the new edition of The Last Great Event at Dimbola recently. Festival Hands is a truly impressive, large-scale (approx 6’x4’) curved ceramic mosaic - hand-crafted by Portelli, taking many months of work (see next page) - it’s a memorial of hand-prints - like those in early cave-paintings - palm-signatures of those celebrities who were there in ’68, ’69 and ’70, collected by Guy and given a position in his mosaic memorabilia celebrating all three of the first festivals made by Ray Foulk and his family and friends in 1968, 1969, and 1970, when, incidentally, they were all based in the West Wight - in Totland and Freshwater mostly, though the festivals were held at Godshill, Wootton and Afton - they were organised from Totland. The meticulous crafting of Festival Hands hints at the Hollywood hand-prints (in the pavement at Grauman's Chinese Theatre) - three-dimensional, tangible, personal, imprinted graffito - these are of course, Portelli’s handicraft, juxtaposing and ‘fixing’ these in this celebration and homage to these first three festivals…
The whole Hands panel is about 5 feet x3 feet (1.5 metres x1.2 metres) and its a beautifully-crafted ceramic mosaic - as you can see from the nig close-up above. I really love this combination of new visions allied to ancient crafts - it is a symbol of what we want to achieve at West Wight CultureFest.
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