Concerned with memory and the memorial, Tolle’s projects, such as the Irish Hunger Memorial, completed in 2002 in New York’s Battery Park, have made him one of the most celebrated artists working in public space in the USA.

The form is often historicist – extensive research and laborious craft, frequently involving a team of experts, go into the creation of apparently ‘literal’ replicas of objects, buildings or environments. But the purpose of this focus on the past is to satisfy the present, and the process is subservient to the end-users’ experience of the subject matter – in film terms, this is docu-drama, not documentary.

Tolle stresses the affective experience: beauty is as critical as the concept, and the viewer is located inside the work (as conjuror of an absent presence) rather than outside it. Significantly, the memorial mentioned above is named for the ‘Irish Hunger’, a subjective experience of continuing human need, not for the ‘Irish Famine’, an objective historical scarcity of resources. Certain events in history are privileged depending on the historian’s values, and there are parallels for (art) objects and buildings in our environment.

Tolle is fascinated by the process whereby we give imaginary value to certain objects, and by the impact of this process on the material world.

Lewis Biggs