A short video piece from the late eighties, Atherton as The Sculptor describes a site specific work involving life-size models of rock climbers installed on a mountainside somewhere in the Yorkshire Dales. Atherton delivers an underplayed and almost believable monologue about the realization of the project, before laying bare the entire charade at the end of the piece when it is revealed that the monumental sculpture is in fact a small stone on the table top with miniature plastic figures glued to it. The title of the video was ‘Scaling Up’, a typical double take on semantics, but its play on the relationship or the gap between model and reality is deadly serious, especially seen today from the perspective of a world in which the distance between virtual and real has collapsed.’ – Jeremy Welsh