In the sculpture Copying the Rock (1995), Lonnie Holley took a beaten-up photocopier, placed a rock on its scanner and scrawled under its lid: “It’s like I am living in hell.”
Holley, who was born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1950, has described the motivation for the work in the context of the history of Black communities, particularly in the southern states. “We people have had a hard time, but we struggled through it,” he said. But technology, symbolised by the copier, brings “new problems” and “we can’t just copy the past. We got to deal with the new.”
