Home: 3 bed-semi, 2013, Jac Scott. Three discarded rusty mattresses and five abandoned bird’s nests. 50 × 65 × 60cm. (Photo: Rob Fraser)
THE SCULPTORS
Sculpture is the chorus for waking and the drug for sleeplessness.
Jac Scott, 2013.
JAC SCOTT
In my own practice the focus is on creating issue-based work that investigates the environmental issues behind fractured realities. My preoccupation lies in exploring the enigma of our existence, revealed in our ways of being, our relationship with our environs and the marks we leave behind. The aim is to have an oblique potency that acknowledges the world’s dark underbelly, while acting as a catalyst for igniting debate. The foundation is underpinned by the questioning of those issues that drive a world without a sense of equilibrium.
As an innate researcher I have not lost that child-like curiosity and wonder about the world – taking risks and confronting boundaries both in concept and materials are endemic. The emphasis on research and questioning has avoided a myopic narrative, delivering an informed dynamism that maintains freshness in my practice.
The fabrication of ‘stuff’ poses a conundrum in that as a sculptor while I create, I also wish to reduce the amount of ‘things’. Consequently, part of my quest is to reduce and reuse, which demands some innovative use of ‘finds’. The work is intensive, saturated with cognitive battles juxtaposed against searches for harmony with incongruous matter. Hence, it requires a significant amount of experimentation, analysis and evaluation.
Collaborating with scientists and geographers is the mainstay of my work – to investigate the notion of ‘manscape’ – humanity’s illusion of the naturalness of the environment. Man’s mark on the planet is extensive, explicit and acknowledged, but our embedded sense of reality belies the true depth of our impact. This concept is explored in the Beautiful Dystopias Collection where the relationship between contaminated environs and the anthropocentric compass is examined. This mapping of the hidden impacts on the planet has dictated the re-examining of the commonplace – a cognitive reconfiguring of the ‘common ground’ we all share. Both as metaphor and in material selection, my artistic response focuses on brooding degradation: peeling layers inviting a meditation on the narrative exposed.
It is appreciated that our ways of being are often revealed in our relationship to our environs and to each other, and that the symbiosis is fragile and temperamental. My work aims not to offer a panacea or judgemental retort, (we are all culpable), but to investigate the inter-connectedness of humanity and the environment through exploring the less visible imprints. We fail to recognise our impact on even the simplest land and seascapes, often perceiving ‘wild’ places as unmanaged and natural. There is nowhere on our planet that has not felt the hand of man, even those expansive terrains known as wildernesses, such as the boreal forests and the central deserts, are subject to an anthropocentric pulse. Man stands aloof from nature, surveying the Earth as a resource to be devoured and exploited, ignoring the dynamic undertow.
In my Home series I question the idea of home as a place of refuge from the outside world and, paradoxically, if the world is home to our species then where is the refuge?
Atomic Equilibrium, 2013, Jac Scott. Old wooden picture frame, found discarded door lock, hand forged nail. 20 × 36 × 16cm. (Photo: Rob Fraser)
A home does not simply specify where you live; it can also signify who you are (socially, economically, sexually, ethnically) and where you ‘belong’ (geographically, culturally). And a house or a dwelling is full of the occupant’s corporeality, of sleeping, eating, loving: of its existence as a home. Moreover, a house contains evidence of the intimate relationship between space and time. While the space of the constructed building may shelter people or families over long periods of time, the evidence of more transitory individual lives is visible in traces in and on the building and its furniture. These ‘traces’ may take the form of damage, dirt, dust, decorations, scratches, repairs and so on.
Extract from Gill Perry ‘Dream Houses: installations and the home’, Themes in Contemporary Art.
Applying this idea of home, as described above in the quote from Gill Perry’s ‘Dream Houses: installations and the home’, but to the Earth, rather than a building, invites a new perspective on our custodial duties.
The Earth is home not only to us, but also to many other organisms – it provides the right elements: atmosphere, temperature, sustenance and time, for us to prosper. Sustaining a world with a sense of equilibrium towards these fundamentals and appreciating the interconnectedness of them all is vital for our home to flourish.
I created Home: 3 bed-semi from three discarded mattresses I found washed up on the beach. The waves had ravaged the upholstery leaving a tangled web of rusting and flaking metal armatures. Salvaged, the mattress cores were crushed and compacted into a cuboid by a baling machine in a scrap metal yard, normally used for condensing old metal cans into bales ready for recycling. The spirit of the springs, now largely tamed, was further restrained to prevent the metal’s memory returning.
Five fragile birds’ nests rescued from local hedges in midwinter adorn the ‘bed’ and remind us that a shelter is temporary if not nurtured.
In Beautiful Dystopia the concept of dystopia is considered – an illusionary perfect world where Authority maintains its totalitarianism through systematic discrimination that is geared to enforce its doctrine. Political oppression, blatant bias, a fear of the outside world and a mistrust of the natural is instilled in the dystopian society to control dissent and individuality. The notion of a dystopian society is considered a futuristic notion but this work questions whether our relationship to the planet suggests otherwise.
Home and Away, 2013, Jac Scott. Found rusty mattress, antique mahogany floor lamp, antique brass birdcage, spray paint stencilled birds on wall. Dimensions variable. (Photo: Jac Scott)
Home and Away (detail), 2013, Jac Scott. Installation PR1 Gallery, Preston, UK. Found rusty mattress, antique mahogany floor lamp, antique brass birdcage, spray paint stencilled birds on wall. Dimensions variable. (Photo: Rob Fraser)
Beautiful Dystopia, 2013, Jac Scott. Polymer plaster, recycled glass, found metal rod and pipe, abandoned blackbird nest, paint. 25 × 130 × 50cm. (Photo: Rob Fraser)
Book of Revelations is a series of wall-based sculptures that aim, through a dishevelled mourning incarnate, to silently contemplate the fractured reality we have created. The peeling layers invite a meditation on the narrative exposed, while the found objects transpose and complicate the space from painting towards sculpture – settling in neither. The brooding degradation is juxtaposed against the unsettling extravagance of the golden frame.
Our view is framed. The duality of being is that we seek the security of frameworks in our lives while remaining curious about the wider world. Science and art inform and nurture our quest for expansion to the physical and metaphysical worlds we inhabit. The magnitude and monumental narrative of the planet ignite wonder yet conversely endow a sense of insignificance to mortal man.
Harnessing the redundant golden frame as a symbolic border, one that demarcates the contents as worthy of being luxuriously wrapped, the sculptures present artefacts dislodged from our focus of possession. The discarded, retrieved and redefined objects are imbued with metaphor and meaning. The damaged frame, holding fragmented spaces while clinging to the precious cargo, defies the loss and reveres its ostentatious past. Metaphorically, the frame highlights the paradoxical interconnectedness between destruction and renewal, past and present, consumption and disposal. The fractured structure signals the frailty of the framework as an illusion of security.
The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility.
Einstein, A., Physics and Reality, Journal of the Franklin Institute.
Book of Revelations: Mankind, 2013, Jac Scott. Antique mahogany easel, discarded gold frame, plaster, paint, cloth, broken mirror, old spectacles, human hair. 96 × 67 × 6cm. (Photo: Rob Fraser)
Bio Myopia (detail), 2013, Jac Scott. 38 × 23 × 19cm. Found road tar, discarded metal rod, glass test tube, seabird skull. (Photo: Rob Fraser)
Site 2801, 2012, Gong Yuebin. Installation California State University, Sacramento. Clay, fibreglass, flower petals. Dimensions variable. (Photo: Gong Yuebin)
The artist’s message is a key for the audience to open their own door to experience the sculpture in 360 degrees.
The artist in conversation with the author, 2013.
Gong Yuebin creates haunting, poetic installations of monumental proportions, both in concept and in scale. His ambitious works pose searching questions about life, death and the future for humanity. Informed by his difficult childhood in China during the Cultural Revolution, Yuebin’s artistic responses are emotional statements about his experiences and beliefs. He recalls:
I was born in one of the poorest mountain villages of China. Because I came into this world with marks of condemned status, children of landlords and antirevolutionary, throughout my childhood memory, I had no part in anything to do with other people. The peach orchid in the backyard and the little hill behind my home contained my entire childhood. Whenever it rained, big chunks of soil eroded away so fast as if the hill was disappearing in front of my eyes. Other children would run home. But I always charged up to the top of the hill and covered the soil, to protect it with my small body, from the big raindrops. When the rain stopped, I would look at the soil that had been washed away and cry.
Extract from artist’s statement, 2009.
In his work Life’s Crossroad, Yuebin identified the charred remains of a forest fire as symbolic sentinels of the human condition with regard to life and death. This, his first installation of epic proportions created from borrowing massive dead trees from the Sierra, USA, was executed in 2010, and marked a clear and new direction for the artist. Materials that for him captured the essence of humanity and nature, in their very corporeality and substance, now superseded his passion for traditional Chinese painting. This haunting installation was composed of salvaged burnt-out tree trunks painted with phosphorescent red paint and draped in chains. The colour was deliberately chosen to convey both shock and warning. To underline the tension and foreboding, the pieces were lit using black lighting in which the blood-red paint ominously glowed. In its echoing of the burning embers, the pervading atmosphere of Life’s Crossroad was eerily laced with a sense of otherness.
Several thousands years of human history shows the ruthlessness of human beings, not only towards its own species but also toward all forms of life in this world. I believe that someday humans will apologize for the lives that have been cut short. I believe that in addition to the lives of our own species, there are more important life forms in this world that sustain our present and future lives. Life goes on in everything and should be sustained. Life and death is intertwined.
Gong Yuebin, Sacramento, 10 February, 2011.
A sense of a dystopian vision is present in his installation Site 2801 where he entreats the viewer to become a ‘future archaeologist’. His inspiration was the site where the famous Terracotta Warriors and Horses of Xi’an, China (the funereal army of the first emperor of the third century BC) was discovered by a poor farmer in 1974. Two hundred replica warriors, made by Yuebin in Xi’an in the traditional way using terracotta clay, form the main component to this work. The army of statues include twenty modern terracotta combat troops hidden in the ranks carrying four disintegrating nuclear missile casings. The weapons of mass destruction, although presented as deteriorating, cradle giant new-born babies adorned with ancient faces, coloured blood-red, lying naked inside the missiles. Symbolic of future generations, the vulnerable infants evoke moral deliberations for the onlookers. This is Yuebin’s aim – to take the viewer on a transformative journey across time, while posing questions about the potential aftermath of our actions and how we have a chance to change.
Life’s Crossroad, 2010, Gong Yuebin. Installation Gong Studio, Sacramento, California. Found burnt trees, steel plates, metal chains, acrylic paint, and fluorescent lighting. Dimensions variable. (Photo: Gong Yuebin)
Site 2801 (detail), 2012, Gong Yuebin. Installation Crocker Art Museum, California, USA. Clay, fibreglass. Dimensions variable. (Photo: Gong Yuebin)
The delivery intensifies with ambient lighting that creates a lugubrious mood, reminiscent of a crematorium, while poignant white flower petals are offered to visitors who are invited to join the morbid drama and to solemnly toss them across the bodies at the ‘funeral’. Yuebin comments on Site 2081 in Sacramento 10 February 2011:
White floral petals and a maze of white curtain walls illuminated by ghostly florescent lighting surrounded and filled Site 2801. In this macabre setting the historical drama takes place, through enactments of moral contradiction and human tragedies: asking why we must destroy life to preserve life.
Symbolic white rose petals, made of silk, formed ritual offerings to the dead as visitors gently threw the petals at the scene of pathos, and thus participated in a mock funeral that transcended time and space. This formed a symbolical bid of eternal farewell to the most powerful of all ancient armies, the most destructive and deadly of today’s weapons, and also to the infants that represent our ardent hopes for an uncertain future. Through these ritual gestures, can we bear witness to history’s endless and tragic wars, or hear the painful and anguished cries of the victims? Can we still rationalize that past wars were of necessity and justice, rather than admitting that all wars are promulgated through conspiracies of greed and hatred? As we find more efficient ways to maim and kill, should we still claim to be members of advanced civilizations? And what is the value of a human life when it is reduced to a target inside the crosshairs of a gun, or to a mere blip on a computer screen? Perhaps the descending phosphorescent white petals, tossed by concerned viewers, will help us bury our atrocious inhumanity.
With sculpture one can create the illusion of life, which reflects the fact that life as we see it is an illusion anyway.
The artist in conversation with the author, 2012.
Pascale Pollier creates poetic 3D renditions of anatomically referenced ‘body maps’ that celebrate human life and death. The immediacy of the subject matter and her ability to capture realism provoke reactions ranging from quietly unsettling to outrage. Her work is not for the faint-hearted – its honesty in its clear intent confronts all who gaze at the wonder of the human form in its various states of undress – shedding clothes or skin.
THE QUICK AND THE DEAD
Mortal flesh and bone with benign fleeting soul composed grief-stricken structure I doth require your disengaged frame, your relinquished mould before this beautiful perfection mingles moist turf and oak and throws of graveyard soil many brights have wrought and eyed upon thee and chalked eternal masterworks from thee bequeath therefore your strange intriguing tenements of clay to medic shaman and artist and behold as absolute awaits.
Pascale Pollier, artist statement, Confronting Mortality with Art and Science, Vubpress, Brussels University Press, 2008.
These extraordinary sculptures incubate familiar narratives with resonance of Ron Mueck’s work, but unlike Mueck, Pollier approaches from a medical science perspective. This guides dissection of our understanding of this mortal coil with disembodied realistic axioms. Pollier embraces philosophy, psychology, anatomy, art and alchemy in her practice. She states:
My work is an attempt to capture the point where art and science meld. An alchemist at heart, I begin with observation and experimentation but my process of creating is steeped in solid scientific research and findings. My inspiration is drawn from observing the internal and external human body in all its diversity, strength, immortality, fragility, disease, mortality and death. New technologies and philosophies, quantum physics, Nano technology, animatronics are my muses and are important in my work.
The artist in conversation with the author, 2012.
Confronting Mortality, 2007, Pascale Pollier. Wax, mixed media. Lifesize. (Photo: Ingeborg Van Dooren)
In 2007 Pollier was commissioned to create a sculpture for the Antwerp conference Confronting Mortality with Art and Science. Her response was a life-sized wax model where the figure is only half-clothed in skin. The figure examines his own muscle fibre while contemplating his own mortality. Confronting Mortality entwines humour with a gentle morose curiosity that coaxes the viewer to edge nearer. The work, made from wax, is highly realistic and shows Pollier’s exacting making skills and accuracy at depicting the human form. These abilities were harnessed by plastinator Gunther von Hagens for his Body Worlds exhibition.
The concept of unwrapping skin to expose the vulnerable self was further explored in the autobiographical sculpture Female écorché. Pollier explains:
This sculpture, which portrays myself as a flayed female, is showing the strength and fragility of the human body. When one is naked one reveals the vulnerability of the self and the ego, but when stripped of skin one exposes a human vulnerability. Still, the woman stands strong, although communication has been interrupted, which is a sign of our times. Integrated into the digital, she is wearing headphones and is gazing upwards so no eye contact is possible. She has the headphones wired to her heart, thus she is tuned in to her emotions.
Extract from the artist’s website, 2013.
In Tesla’s Angst: A Tragedy of Errors, a fragile, deformed newborn baby lies with its placenta still attached in a rudimentary cot. For Pollier, the baby is symbolic of mankind’s self-determined troubled future and the placenta a disintegrating planet Earth – from its core a sound of the Geiger counter, detecting radioactivity, is heard. Eerily intense and disturbing, Tesla’s Angst: A Tragedy of Errors delivers a compulsion for contemplation.
The foetal motif is expanded in APGAR Score 3 With Aggravated Nervous System, where an adult male lies with his umbilical cord attached to a painted placenta. His back reveals the exposed nerves of his spinal cord; the sculpture references birth, death and the mortal coil.
Belgian-born Pollier has a truly European practice, but her focus is on universal themes – in the lugubrious History of Hurt I, II and III, she considers the narrative of global angst and suffering from various perspectives. In History of Hurt I, an open heart, newspaper, magnifying glass and a range of medical instruments are orchestrated to create a tension between the victims and voyeurs of world tragedies. In II, mummified hands clasp barbed wire in exasperation at the loss of hope and in III, the kneeling legs of a child at prayer address the ruination of innocence.
STILL HERE
The man in a white stillness zipped up encircled with nervous energy opponents the motionlessness serene absence of movement, moving us so deeply the non beating of the heart making ours skip faster than ever. Limb by limb removed brought us together the afterbirth indeed emotions pouring out like the wrinkled soft pink skin curtain dripping clear red yellow orange deep greenish blue. like the light shining through the melancholic afterbirth lyrical dark hue we are still here.
Poem by Pascale Pollier, 2010.
Female écorché (detail), 2009, Pascale Pollier. Wax, polyester, lead, headphones. 190 × 70 × 35cm. (Photo: Eleanor Crook)
… balancing the beautiful and brutal, the transcendent and abject.
Extract from artist’s statement, 2013.
Elpida Hadzi-Vasileva has a truly unique artistic practice, focusing on transforming animal detritus that traditionally repels and disgusts into beautifully crafted artworks that intrigue and delight. Famous for her unusual gamut of materials and her intense research methodology, she develops innovative processes to invoke a fascination for transient phenomena. Hadzi-Vasileva’s palette truly expands the language of sculpture, as her artistic discourse is with matter that most artists would shy away from – caul fat (the thin membrane that surrounds the internal organs of cattle), omasum (cow’s third stomach lining), rat skins, silkworm cocoons, fish skins, and bones from fowl and rabbits; plus the more acceptable but still adventurous – rice, butter, watercress, fir cones and trees.
One of the reasons I enjoy working with the materials I choose is that they challenge presumptions or limited perspectives of what art can be and how it can engage other issues. They also question what can be beautiful.
In conversation with Lauren Meir for A Feast for the Eyes: Food as Fine Art www.mutualart.com (26 October 2011).
Macedonia, the traditional agricultural country of her birth, has strongly shaped her practice with its relationship with the natural environment (around 65 per cent of the land is covered in forest). Her remote mountainous home and her childhood spent exploring the countryside, or drawing and making and winning prizes for her sculptures, have all influenced her creative perspective. At eight she won her first sculpture prize and since then she has received many accolades. She has been resident in the United Kingdom since 1992, was showcased at the 51st International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia in the New Forest Pavilion with ArtSway and represented Macedonia at the 55th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia.
Hadzi-Vasileva journeys into new environments with relish – fresh challenges ignite her passions to respond to sites in unexpected ways, but always using materials that resonate with the locale. She elects to craft her installations meticulously and has little interest in materials of significant monetary worth, preferring to use the discarded to explore the concept of ‘value’. Her skill at manipulating pattern and texture are resolute, exquisitely illustrated in the work Reoccurring Undulation for Towner, the contemporary art museum in Eastbourne, UK. In Reoccurring Undulation Hadzi-Vasileva cleaned and preserved 960 salmon skins then mounted them on zinc plated tiles – the effect is a stunning undulating pattern in a subdued, natural palette.
The extraordinary tactility of her work was showcased wonderfully in The Wish of the Witness collection. Here the discarded animal carcasses and skins from Pied à Terre, the Michelinstarred restaurant, where Hadzi-Vasileva was the first artist-in-residence, were stripped and scoured, preserved and arranged. Reflecting the calibre of the host restaurant, she highlighted some of the animal parts in edible foil made from 23.5 carat transfer gold.
In Butterflies in the Stomach preserved caul fat was transformed into a maze of diaphanous drapery, the filigree echoing the history of lace in Valenciennes, where the gallery was located for her residency. 250m2 of pig’s stomach were suspended to form an ethereal labyrinth where visitors strolled among the meandering veils of organic waste bathed in the pungent odour. Hadzi-Vasileva elucidates on Butterflies in the Stomach:
The intricate and slow production methods of traditional lace-making resonate well within my work, where laborious and skilful work is required to make a piece of art. Here I brought together surprising cohabitants: lace and offal. Making a labyrinth out of caul fat that was just as intricate as lace-making.
For the Macedonian commission at the Public Room Promo Center, Skopje, Inherent Beauty, Hadzi-Vasileva sourced numerous pig stomach membranes to create a highly tactile tapestry. From afar the installation has a contemporary monotone design aesthetic, yet on closer inspection the caul fat reveals a sense of otherness that is unsettling: each square has its own unique visual poetry.
In 2013 she represented Macedonia at the 55th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia, with the creation of a major installation Silentio Pathologia, reflecting on the unusual subject of migration of disease across Europe. In addition to current concerns she researched historical references of the legendary medieval plagues, to deliver an ambitious work juxtaposing rat skins, silkworm cocoons and woven silk against sheets of steel. Hadzi-Vasileva is at pains to highlight that in all her interventions the disembodied animals are all ethically sourced and are purposefully employed to have immediate impact, however distasteful. It is key for her that the commodification of animals is not a blinkered nor latent message but one that confronts. She has an innate skill at rendering such ‘unpalatable’ base material into exquisitely made and erudite sculptures and installations that are simply mesmerising.
Silentio Pathologia, 2013, Elpida Hadzi-Vasileva. Installation Macedonian Pavilion, Scuola dei Laneri, 55th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia. Steel, silkworm cocoons, silk, rat skins, live rats, bespoke cages, cotton and wire. Dimensions variable. (Photo: Elpida Hadzi-Vasileva)
Silentio Pathologia (detail), 2013, Elpida Hadzi-Vasileva. Installation Macedonian Pavilion, Scuola dei Laneri, 55th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia. Steel, silkworm cocoons, silk, rat skins, live rats, bespoke cages, cotton and wire. Dimensions variable. (Photo: Mark Segal)
Sculpture is poetry in three dimensions defined by the physicality of its mass, or lack thereof. The artist in conversation with the author, 2013.
Michael Shaw is a British artist who specializes in creating curvilinear abstract sculptures that appear to dance in the clouds. His work often floats in space like a 3D mark drawn in the air. The singular forms nod to minimalist edicts, and Donald Judd’s influence is referenced, yet Shaw has harnessed an ethereal palette for many of his works to deliver sculptures with a unique signature. The simplicity of the forms disguises the complex design process that underpins his practice. His aesthetic language is articulated in the curve – he celebrates the innate appeal and geometry of the shape with dynamic versions of concentric, sinuous and curvaceous forms.
The dynamism of geometry is what, in my opinion, drives the language of sculpture. The artist in conversation with the author, 2013.
There is a strong sensual quality to all his work, whether floating or wall-based, that demands to be caressed with a lightness of touch. His choice of a seductive palette embraces light and air as its main constituents – activating the void with delicacy and delight. Materials such as ripstop (parachute fabric), polyvinylchloride (pvc), acrylic, resin and nylon form the physical cradles, while he often uses stainless steel as the hidden armature. Harnessing the latest technologies, processes and materials to execute his works is a key element in his practice:
…the endless permutations of optical conundrum, as light both falls on, through, and is reflected by, tense curvatures of pressurized translucency.
Nigel Slight, Membranes and Edges exhibition catalogue essay, 2005.
Site-specificity added a liberating dynamic to Shaw’s practice with the design of inflatables meandering and twisting among architecture. INF 12 was commissioned by the Victoria and Albert Museum in London to encircle Bernini’s Neptune and Triton. Responding to the aquatic theme of the carvings, Shaw designed the inflatable to echo an undulating wave with its cycle of inflating and deflating motion. The elliptical form contorts to complement Neptune’s pose, while the sculpture’s gold lustre was inspired by the concept of a halo in celebration of the master sculptor, Bernini.
INF 13, 2010, Michael Shaw. Installation Schwartz Gallery, London. Ripstop parachute fabric, air, fan, digital timer. 1880 × 840 × 320cm. (Photo: Michael Shaw)
With INF 13 for the Schwartz Gallery in London, he created an eighteen-metre long sinuous sculpture that dominated the gallery space. Writhing and pulsating, dressed in a fluorescent pink casing, the form possessed an intestinal body laced with sexual innuendo. Responding to each site has led Shaw to emphasize and circumnavigate structural features, such as the cast iron pillars in the Schwartz Gallery. He finds the challenges stimulating and engineers the inflatables around the obstacles, such as stairways, mezzanines and doorways, so that there is a synthesis.
INF14 involved a curvilinear form winding its way around Gallery Oldham’s central lighting rig. Its orange counterpart descended like molten lava or an alien stalactite, only to be penetrated by the sinister flowering of the dark tendril. Whatever it was, it seemed on the brink of devouring the architectonic structure, like a giant intestinal parasite.
Michael Shaw, Chameleons and Shape Shifters II, exhibition catalogue, Gallery Oldham 2012.
Shaw is fascinated by the idea of the chameleon and investigating ways that he can bring this concept into his work through the manipulation of air, light, form and colour. His experiments have led to some intriguing interplay with surfaces and the viewer, and how the illusion is blurred towards reality. The inception of ‘breathing’ into his sculptures, as a notion towards living forms, has created a biomorphic resonance. The animation of timed inflation and deflation cycles enhances the readings towards more amoebic interpretation. Block colour, single textures and a limited use of materials underline his adoption of the minimalist doctrine, but Shaw then manipulates these with light to echo metamorphism.
INF 12, 2009, Michael Shaw. Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Ripstop parachute fabric, air, fan, digital timer. 560 × 660 × 180cm. (Photo: Michael Shaw)
I am interested in the simultaneity of humour and distress, banality and the possibility of meaning.
Extract from artist’s statement, 2012.
Liliana Porter has an eye for capturing the humorous perspective of the human condition in her exquisite miniature installations. Born in Argentina and resident in the USA, Porter scours flea markets and antique shops across the Americas for finds that ignite her sense of drama to create poignant ‘theatrical vignettes’. She assembles her cast from inanimate objects, toys, ornaments and figurines, and orchestrates them to make commentary that charms and provokes the audience. Her sculptures often depict challenging scenarios that her miniature people are confronting with varying degrees of bravado or trepidation, reflecting the variance in man’s own character.
The Anarchist, 2012, Liliana Porter. Wall installation. Shelf with figurine and yarn. 142 × 110 × 26cm. (Photo: Liliana Porter)
The objects have a double existence. On the one hand they are mere appearance, insubstantial ornaments, but, at the same time, have a gaze that can be animated by the viewer, who, through it, can project the inclination to endow things with an interiority and identity.
Extract from artist’s statement, 2012.
Him (detail), 2012, Liliana Porter. Wall installation. 13 wooden blocks and acrylic on shelf. 14 × 109 × 26cm. (Photo: Liliana Porter)
Porter manipulates the spatial relationships between her subject and the void, believing the empty space to be almost a protagonist. By embracing the blank, abstracted space she intensifies the dialogue between the work and the viewer. She wants to transport the scene to a place without history or time to avoid the perceptual limits of a temporary context.
To Go Back (detail), 2011, Liliana Porter. Wall installation. Found porcelain pitcher, figurine, ink, and shelf. 18 × 61 × 15cm. (Photo: Liliana Porter)
Sculpture is formed by the many impulses of reality going though different prisms and filters, addressing our fears and affinities to reconstruct a certain time and space.
The artist in conversation with the author, 2012.
Nika Neelova creates dark, monumental sculptures that evoke a primal foreboding of the apocalypse. She is fascinated by the notion of the ruin and its narrative where time, place and our imposition of history entwine. Harnessing architectural structures and fragments, she references the embedded and physical residues of the objects to gain insight and proffer a genius loci. Her choice of a strong, muscular palette (judiciously limited to burnt, salvaged timbers, concrete, ash and graphite), further imbues the work with power and impact, underlining the prevailing lugubrious mood.
The work is addressing segments of existence that have or must collapse, referencing the disillusionement and the disintegration of utopias that ensues from their confrontation with reality. Often reminiscent of the past, the pieces are also presupposing a future in which this present shifts into a state of disrepair.
Extract from the artist’s statement, 2013.
Russian Neelova’s installations paradoxically possess a sense of otherness while abnegating human presence. The imprints of passing generations are subtle but revered, left to form the aftermath for future peoples to unravel. The paths she creates within the installations, where viewers can engage directly with the works, garner a rich tactility among the grave disquiet. The pervading atmosphere engenders a tension between repositories of memory against an erosion of place.
My work is often about introducing new narratives into recognizable situations and it is this ‘recognizability’ that instigates a more individual relationship with the viewers, activating their memories and personal associations. The collected and retrieved fragments, the history and origins of objects and materials give it an extra fourth dimension.
The artist in conversation with the author, 2012.
For Neelova the relationship to found building materials is profound. Addressing architectural fragments cements her ideas about memory and how a building can relate our experiences, however skewed from reality, in the reading of them. The lure of the study of the erosion of time, and how entropy and decay impact on function, remains her preoccupation. She aims to capture the moment before collapse and ruination – an ambitious challenge where the balance of fragility must be in tension against core strength. Towards this goal, Neelova manipulates the notion of ‘distance’ through the casting of objects to capture another state of existence - the original object becomes dysfunctional, while the cast object celebrates its own vulnerability. To underpin her conceptual message, Neelova pushes the materials to their limits casting them lightly and thinly so that they form cracks and become unstable.
In the sculpture Scaffolds Today, Monument Tomorrow, Neelova juxtaposes scorched reclaimed timbers against rope cast in paper. She comments,
The rope cast in paper becomes as hard as concrete, yet through this material transformation it also becomes incredibly fragile, as seen through the surface cracks and crumbling of the edges. Thereby the rope is distanced from its original form and deprived of all its original properties. Also, drawing references from the distant past, this piece focuses a lot more on the psychology of perception and embodiment.
Endless coils of cast rope are there to symbolize attachment and at the same time the complete failure and incapacity to get attached because of the natural fragility of its material. Cracks on the surface draw attention to the temporality of their representations. At the same time the hardness of the material, which is frozen in space, alludes to monumentality. The title draws references to its sense of loss and sense of belonging as well as the duality of interpretations.
The artist in conversation with the author, 2013.
Fragments Shored Against the Ruins, 2013, Nika Neelova. Installation Vigo Gallery. Mixed media. 350 × 250 × 100cm. (Photo: courtesy of Vigo Gallery)
Burning meteors leave no dust, 2013, Nika Neelova. Installation Vigo Gallery. Cast concrete, aircraft cable. Dimensions variable: 210cm each piece. (Photo: courtesy Vigo Gallery)
In Burning Meteors Leave No Dust a collection of casts of propellers form sentinels of crumbling concrete. The casts were taken directly from antique aircraft propellers from the 1900s when Orville Wright defined his first successful airfoil as a twirling bird’s wing. The sensuous and curvaceous form transposes from its industrially manufactured resilience to a delicate piece of sculpture. Neelova manipulates the traditionally substantial and strong building material of concrete to appear fragile and unsafe – to engineer a conflict with the iconic propeller form. The dream of flight is shattered through the heavy anchoring to the ground.
Partings, 2012, Nika Neelova. Installation The Crisis Commission, Somerset House, London. Original Somerset House Georgian door cast in concrete, burnt timber, rope. 500 × 400 × 300 cm. (Photo: courtesy of Sam Mellish, David Roberts Collection)
The journey towards commemoration is investigated, played out and celebrated in Commemoration – a series of plaques cast from original coalhole covers. The path of commemoration has a lateral thread for Neelova, one that references the historical associations with religious altars, funerary monuments and memorials. She delivers a contemporary twist to the traditional practice by casting them from charcoal dust and graphite – both subject matter and classical artistic medium. Embedded in pavements and locked from inside the house, the covers hide a chute that directly leads to the cellars. Now, with the coalhole covers mainly redundant due the passing of the Clean Air Act, Neelova commemorates their history in this series.
Denied the possibility to serve their original purpose, they [the objects] become images of deprivation and interruption, reflecting of the past and present of existence in the time of ruination.
Extract from artist’s statement, 2013.
A commission for The Somerset House & Christie’s Crisis Commission consisted of eleven original Somerset House doors cast sparingly in concrete, then displaced in space. The work, aptly titled Partings, presents the doors without purpose, no longer a useful device for division and separation of environments. She ties the pieces in place with rope to dislodge any useful interpretation of them as openings or as their original role. The sculpture stands strong as testament to her artistic voice.
Commemorate sw19 series, 2013, Nika Neelova. Charcoal dust and graphite. 36cm diameter. (Photo: courtesy of Vigo Gallery)
Commemorate w8 series, 2013, Nika Neelova. Charcoal dust and graphite. 36cm diameter. (Photo: courtesy of Vigo Gallery)
Commemorate wc1 series, 2013, Nika Neelova. Charcoal dust and graphite. 36cm diameter. (Photo: courtesy of Vigo Gallery)
In sculpture I am celebrating the beauty of the overlooked natural object.
The artist in conversation with the author, 2013.
Kate MccGwire creates voluptuous sculptures that hypnotize and beguile with their sensual beauty and intriguing symbolism. The humble feather is transformed in MccGwire’s hands into ambiguous swirling forms imbued with references to the human body, water and animalia. These ethereal sculptures capture texture, pattern and colour to mesmerizing effect – it is difficult not to seduced by the curvaceous feathering with its lustre and iridescence.
Feathers became MccGwire’s muse some years ago, when moulting pigeons innocently shed feathers near her studio, striking a particular resonance with her as a progression from her work with another keratin source, human hair. The natural environment has played a key role in her life and the innate pull to the organic is manifest. She has always had a symbiotic relationship with rivers, growing up in Norfolk, England, with a boat-builder father and three siblings ready to mess about on the water. This continues today with her studio which is in a 150-year-old Dutch barge moored to an island on the River Thames.
Working on the river is amazing because you get this constant fantastic light. I’m totally aware of the seasons, nature and temperament of the river, and that really feeds into what I make. The island itself it also fascinating, as well as being a rustic idyll it is also a 1940s’ time capsule on a grand scale.
Extract from an interview for Coates and Scarry, 2012.
Gyre, 2012, Kate MccGwire. Crow feathers and mixed media. 415 × 770 × 275cm. (Photo: Tessa Angus, courtesy of All Visual Arts)
Sluice, 2009, Kate MccGwire. Installation The Space Between, The Crypt, St. Pancras Church, London. Pigeon feathers and mixed media. 450 × 250 × 500cm. (Photo: Francis Ware)
Coerce, 2012, Kate MccGwire. Mixed media, magpie feathers, antique cabinet. 175 × 61 × 61cm. (Photo: Tessa Angus, courtesy of All Visual Arts)
MccGwire elaborates on her passion for the natural environment:
The peculiarities of the everyday are inspiring to me; the contradictions, patterns and impossibilities of nature are a source of endless fascination. I’m constantly in awe of how the world works on both a micro and macro scale. From the precise engineering of a feather to the patterns of a murmuration of starlings, the world is a boundless muse.
Inter view between the artist and writer Matilda Lundberg, Odalisque magazine April 2013.
There is a commanding aura that pervades all the sculptures – a sinister echoing from another time and place. This otherworldliness embraces the dark side and embellishes the mysterious – both dimensions MccGwire takes pains to imbue in her exquisitely crafted pieces. These qualities have enamoured commissioners to let the artist’s vision expand into sitespecific installations. Evacuate is a major installation work that was originally designed for Tatton Park Biennial in Cheshire, where it stealthily funnelled out from the old blackened cast iron kitchen ovens and across the floor in search of an escape. MccGwire, inspired by the history of feasting on game at the mansion, collected locally sourced poultry and game feathers to make the pieces. In Sluice, for The Crypt, St Pancras, London, pigeon feathers appear to be shot from a hole. MccGwire comments on the installation:
Pigeon feathers spew, forced by some kind of subterranean pressure, from a hole in the floor, to create a swirling vortex of effluence, at once exquisite and disturbing. Extract from artist’s website, 2013.
MccGwire’s oeuvre reflects her influences from the Surrealist and Abjectionist movements and their preoccupation with dislocating beauty and horror to expound disjointed realities. She is absorbed in transposing the duality of the wonder and the darkness of nature in her work. Many of her sculptures writhe and contort, resemble fluid – paradoxically static in site, but virtually full of motion in the rhythmic undulations. These confusing illusions are extolled by the interplay of carved form and intricate manipulation of components. She explains in an interview for Coates and Scarry:
I’m constantly trying to create this fine line between attractive and vaguely disquieting, they are bodily, so we recognise creases and crevices yet also alien and strange. The work uses natural patterns to suggest familiarity and truth yet they are impossible creatures; it’s more like a suffocation or tightness, a manifestation of a feeling or an emotion as opposed to an actual thing. The intent is to produce something that can be read on many levels, both visceral and cerebral at the same time, a Möbius strip both in form and meaning.
The inclusion of obvious restraint, through employing antique vitrines and glass domes normally aligned with taxidermy, in which to squash and display her prey, further questions the association with the sciences and natural history – a collection of Victorian curiosities is evoked. Judith Collins in her essay for the Lure publication says, ‘The viewer approaches with a sense of anxiety, as though stepping too close will cause the apparently headless creature to rear up and break free of its bondage. Something ancient and extinct seems to have the power to come alive.’
MccGwire aims for abstraction – the viewer to ponder on the non-specificity and the possible symbolism of the entwined, embraced and the foil of entrapment.
My experience of beauty and ugliness is of two visceral emotions that intertwine rather than of two separate entities. It’s a relationship I see mirrored in the natural world where there’s both darkness and light – two halves of the same idea; you can’t have one without the other. Working on the river, as I do, means I get to see nature at its most raw – you literally watch as the ‘bucolic idyll’ unravels before your eyes. It’s a never-ending cycle of birth and death, of one animal preying on another, of harsh realities and unhappy endings with fluffy ducklings being snatched by other, carnivorous birds. It’s both beautiful and horrifying.
The artist in conversation with Maria McKenzie, Glass Magazine, March 2013.
Sculpture is about understanding the world through the manipulation of stuff.
The artist in conversation with the author, 2012.
Cath Keay’s sculpture celebrates the notion of a continual coming into being by a metamorphic engagement with living organisms. By deliberately letting her control over the work go, she achieves a liberation that imbues the piece with renewed energy. The next stage is a second life for the sculpture, where nature interferes in the work. The paradoxical interconnectedness between construction, destruction and rejuvenation is a key element of Keay’s oeuvre.
Keay has two passions that guide her practice: one is for 1930s architecture, the other is for employing text in her sculptures. British-born Keay enjoys expanding her horizons and has a truly European practice – combining her love for words and architecture with a continental twist.
The 1930s are the decade furthest in the recall of most of our oldest relatives and acquaintances, a moment of utopian thought that subsequently hardened into dogma. I researched Italian Colonie and Case del Balilla from this era as vivid architectural forms expressing the recollections of some generations ago. They show a playful innocence in the shadow of impending war and upheaval, mirroring the Futurists’ transformation of engineering feats into aesthetic ends in themselves. Cath Keay, British School at Rome Fine Arts, 2008–9 (extract from the exhibition catalogue).
Tirrenia and Late in October, 2009, Cath Keay. Foundation beeswax, aluminum. Tirrenia 70 × 50 × 15cm. Late in October 180 × 12 × 12cm. (Photo: Cath Keay)
Beehive, 2002, Cath Keay. Working beehive inspired by artist’s grandmother, Isobel Gordon’s exam drawings for a department store in 1933. Cedar wood, aluminium and bees. 70 × 70 × 110cm. (Photo: Cath Keay)
Using the attributes of beeswax foundation sheet for her scale models of 1930s’ buildings, Keay shapes the pliable sheet into abstracted miniature avatars of modernist buildings. Her fascination for the iconic architecture directs in-depth research that underpins her sculptures. Each exquisite piece illustrates her expert making skills and sensibilities.
In Calambrone, the Colonia Principe di Piemonte takes the form of an aeroplane if viewed from above, as an architectural embodiment of the contemporaneous Futurist aeropittura. In Cattolica, dormitories suggest streamlined trains welcoming expatriate children. These optimistic holiday buildings appear free from the dictates associated with the modernism of the later Fascist era, yet commands written on the walls belie an insipient credo of regimentation.
Cath Keay, British School at Rome Fine Arts, 2008-09. (extract from the exhibition catalogue)
Celebrating text that possesses ambiguity or has the intrigue of a foreign tongue, and then allowing living organisms to transform it, invokes her interest in transient phenomena. She has a fondness for historical typewriter typeface for its utilitarian appearance – she has formed it in clay and wood and also picked it out with bullets dropped in honeycombs. Keay is also drawn to a flowing cursive script, often used in old advertisements. Ristorante was her first play with florid fonts, where a cardboard case in the shape of the word was filled with oats. The bird food soon attracted the pigeons and a performance element naturally developed. Its success led to the development of script cast in terracotta clay: Fecundity, Feracity and Uberty, were then placed in tanks of seawater and colonized by marine organisms.
Metaphoric comparisons between human and animal societies permeate much of my recent work. The resultant un-authored forms have in turn suggested further anti-formal methods with clay and wood veneers.
Extract from artist’s statement, 2013.
Keay was keen to expand her ideas to capture the notion of a utopian landscape, once dreamed by architects for nearby Middlesbrough, with a more interactive bias. She modelled landmark Brutalist and Modernist buildings in wood then made them into working beehives. These were placed around the city, in the care of local beekeepers, to draw attention to the value of bees to our society and the incredible design and building skills they possess. To maximise the message she engineered a webcam and designed a limited edition of ‘make-your-own-beehive’ packs.
The Middlesbrough landscape is punctuated by remnants of grand visions and laudable ambitions. This work will reassesses these structures; the perceived brutalism will be tempered by their change of scale and their re-colonisation by the natural world.
Industrious colonies of worker bees prompt endless metaphorical interpretations of our own society. However, it is the insects’ architectural abilities that particularly interest me: they follow strict building regulations including east-west alignments of new built comb, regular bee-space corridors ensure easy passage, and all constructions show an astonishing economy of material resources. The modularity of Modernist architecture has strong parallels in what is required for beehives, to enable empty units (called ‘supers’) to be added to accommodate a growing population.
Extract from artist’s statement for rednile projects, Gateshead 2013.
Feracity, 2010, Cath Keay. Sculpture after being submerged in sea for two years. Terracotta, silt and marine organisms. 90 × 40 × 12cm. (Photo: Cath Keay)
My vision of practice has expanded beyond the physical and I look more to an attitude of transformation as being ‘sculptural’ whether it be material, the journeying of ideas or even something as alchemical as the working of the self. For me it resides in an intensity of presence rather than materiality and whether one calls it ‘sculpture’, ‘art’ or something else entirely; is only of taxonomic interest.
The artist in conversation with the author, 2013.
David Chalmers Alesworth’s world combines his love for his adopted country Pakistan with that for his English birthplace, and with his interest in how the historical imprint of Empire interfaces with the present. His world orchestrates art and horticulture in a unique mix that delivers profound works of art that cross both continents and time.
A sense of place has been fundamental to my understanding of the world, the landscape and the living elements in particular. Over the last decade as an artist and researcher I’ve become more involved in issues of identity and the post-colonial.
The artist in conversation with the author, 2013.
Alesworth aims to ‘bridge my psycho-geographical readings of Lahore city with other cultural signifiers’ through the study of impacts from historical colonization of Asia. His fascination with anthropological entropies, and with the deliverance of taxonomies as a legacy from the imperialists, is mapped in his practice. However, his astute observance reveals an intelligent convergence of pathways of comprehension and an appreciation of the realities behind historical records. Alesworth’s art is one of contemplation rather than a robust polemic, articulated in often-frail materials that contain a sensuous, tactile and handmade impulse.
The culture of Pakistan, with a high cultural value assigned to the handcrafted, tribal textiles and hand-knotted carpets in particular, and Alesworth’s research into the post-colonial led him to Michel Foucault’s theory of heterotopia.
... perhaps the oldest example of these heterotopias that take the form of contradictory sites is the garden. We must not forget that in the Orient the garden, an astonishing creation that is now a thousand years old, had very deep and seemingly superimposed meanings. The traditional garden of the Persians was a sacred space that was supposed to bring together inside its rectangle four parts representing the four parts of the world, with a space still more sacred than the others that were like an umbilicus, the navel of the world at its centre (the basin and water fountain were there); and all the vegetation of the garden was supposed to come together in this space, in this sort of microcosm. As for carpets, they were originally reproductions of gardens (the garden is a rug onto which the whole world comes to enact its symbolic perfection, and the rug is a sort of garden that can move across space). The garden is the smallest parcel of the world and then it is the totality of the world. The garden has been a sort of happy, universalizing heterotopia since the beginnings of antiquity.
Extract from Michel Foucault, Des Éspace Autres, 1967.
This has guided Alesworth’s concept of mapping his political commentary on worn carpet. The collection of carpets, that he calls his ‘textile interventions’, are embroidered with plans of the great gardens of Empire.
In Hyde Park, Kashan 1862, Alesworth has transposed a fragment of a historical Stanford map. The old plans reveal part of the original Crystal Palace for the second Great International Exhibition in Hyde Park in London. Through beautifully stitching into the respectfully restored seventy-five-year-old Kashan rug the details are newly etched and documented. The date is key as it returns the viewer to the time shortly after the annexation of the Punjab to the British Empire. This era is a landmark in British history as it references the time when the monarchy reigned over a quarter of the world’s population.
The intersection of pragmatic European garden history (with its references to monarchy, the Empire and its might), and the metaphorical depiction of the eastern paradisiacal garden speak of domination through power. The juxtaposition also brings into focus the artist’s [Alesworth] own position as an Englishman who has lived in Pakistan for more than two decades.
Hammad Nasir, Lines of Control, A Green Cardamom Project, British Council Galleries, London 2011.
In Garden Palimpsest, the Palace of Versailles estate in France, after Abbé Jean Delagrive’s plans in 1746, is demarcated with stitched wool into an antique Kerman carpet. Versailles was selected as it has a strong relationship to the history of Islamic gardens. The potency of line of the embellishment is a powerful over-writing of cultural texts, and adds a layer of meaning beyond its delicate intervention. It references the point in the famous estate’s history where Louis XIV spread his power across the world in conquering and colonizing nations. Poignantly, the Kerman threadbare carpet had lost its rich, vibrant tactility, where many feet have passed over its pile and dust had lodged in its weave, eroded its beauty. Alesworth restored the 150-year-old rug with help from a team of local studio assistants.
Hyde Park Kashan,1862, 2011, David Chalmers Alesworth. Antique hand-knotted Kashan carpet with dyedwool embroidery. 345 × 234cm. (Photo: David Chalmers Alesworth)
Garden Palimpsest, 2010, David Chalmers Alesworth. Antique hand-knotted Kerman carpet with dyed-wool embroidery. 319 × 198cm. (Photo: David Chalmers Alesworth)
Both Versailles and the Royal Hyde Park were conceived as spaces of privilege, apart from everyday life. The Persian concept of the walled garden was also a seven space apart, pairidaeza – ‘pairi’ meaning ‘around’ and ‘daeza’ meaning ‘wall’ and so ‘walled garden’. The English word paradise has its roots in the old Persian word pairadaeza.
In both works at the level of the carpets themselves and their overlaid designs water is a dominant theme, the subtle essence of water within surrounding desert of the charbaghs and the excess of water in the Serpentine and in Le Notre’s grand canal at Versailles. Today water is one of the critical environmental issues, particularly in the subcontinent.
‘The garden’ is every culture’s central metaphor for its relatedness to its ideal of ‘nature’. Though any ideation of ‘Nature’ as something apart from us is completely eroded – as is any simple idea of cultural purity.
The artist in conversation with the author, 2013.
Both Garden Palimpsest and Hyde Park, Kashan 1862 offer us pragmatic narratives of landscape gardening from European history, and Alesworth’s use of metaphor entwines an anthropological matrix of power and domination. Through his time as a citizen of Pakistan, Alesworth has explored his adopted country through noting the visual codes, both explicit and implicit, and rendering them through artistic statements with a geographical footprint. The cross-fertilization of interests in art and horticulture has led to a unique political commentary using unexpected materials – these messages appear to be tempered by the patina (of their re-crafting and prior useage). His work is shown around the globe and ironically is well received by the very nations who form the work’s subject.
Sculpture relates to the real world, to inhabited space, to the constructed environs we inherit and inhabit.
The artist in conversation with the author, 2013.
Mark Houghton works masterfully with the poetics of space and the juncture in tension between found objects placed in the context of his defined boundary. He is a visionary conductor, orchestrating objects so that they become redefined in his hands – delivering bold graphic statements from materials usually unseen and unvalued. Colour has a dynamic potency in his installations, married with form, texture and scale – the juxtaposition of the elements has a geometric harmony that resonates in its mathematical equation.
My search is for portent and potential narrative in the overlooked and seemingly insignificant aspects of the everyday. We are all surrounded by the evidence and detritus of almost 40,000 years of the activity of Homo faber (Man the Creator), and any landscape can essentially be read as an inescapable narrative of intervention. Therefore, I feel it important to celebrate and highlight the overlooked elements, the anti-monuments and non-events of that landscape, as I feel that these are equally relevant, when we are attempting to decipher a given landscape. Discarded items, the un-thoughtabout gaps between buildings, etc., these all have visual qualities that feed into, and inform our piecemeal absorption of our surroundings, that subsequently help us to order and decipher the complexity of the environments we inhabit.
Extract from artist’s statement, 2013.
Houghton’s material palette liberates and embraces the world of the found object. He does not belive in a hierarchy of materials and believes instead that ‘everything is up for grabs and reinterpretation’. The initial inspiration for his sculptures can appear quite inconsequential – chance finds in a junk shop, a line from a song or an unusual positioning of items in the street. Houghton works directly with the materials, believing that this embraces the spontaneity that is crucial to his approach. This has led him to specialize in creating site-specific works. He uses only objects he has found on site and then harnesses their power to make his visual statement. This selfimposed remit engenders a fascinating strangulation of both physical geography and psycho-geography and is one that Houghton relishes. In 2011, Occindental Collusions took form from materials found only on site in Carmathen, Wales – it reads with an interplay of rhythm and the exacting distance Houghton calculates between the placements, that imbue significance where before there was neglect. The neutral colour palette and sensitive lighting create synergy among the discordant artefacts, releasing an ambiance to the onlooker that reassures them it is safe to enter this new domain.
The unnerving experience of meeting Houghton’s work seems somehow closer to reading an instruction manual in a foreign language, but with lovely diagrams.
His practice is a prime example of that which confounds any attempt at a conscious, logical reading. It requires a lateral shift in thinking to be appreciated, which is often kick-started by a ‘key’ element in the work.
Chris Brown, March 2009.
Perfect Imperfection, 2013, Mark Houghton. Found and constructed objects. Dimensions variable. (Photo: Mark Houghton)
Occidental Collusions, 2011, Mark Houghton. Installation West Wales School of the Arts. Materials found on site and video. Dimensions variable. (Photo: Mark Houghton)
Memory of Lemon, 2010, Mark Houghton. Site specific response for the DIY Exhibition for Surface Arts, Exeter. Made from objects and materials found on site. Dimensions variable. (Photo: Mark Houghton)
Dresden is Yellow, Eternity is Pink is another site-specific work where Houghton limited his source materials to those found within a defined boundary of the site in Nottingham. The composition not only echoes his roots in painting, but resembles a 3D animated painting that you can enter and languish inside. The bathing of colour heightens the dynamics within the environment and showcases the sculptor’s innate sense of the value of juxtaposition.
Working Order, in London, adopts a similar approach but this time the execution has a softer appeal – drapes caress the floor, a chair and a pallet, the suspended spheres are balanced with the rigid wooden facets. The mood is gentle…soft, pink and inviting.
In Memory of Lemon, the site-specific installation created in 2010 for Surface Arts, Exeter, Houghton again gives colour the commanding role. Here the influence of Portuguese sculptor Pedro Cabrita Reis is felt – as a dominant artist in the minimalist genre who harnesses colour to exact poetic power, it is difficult not to see nuances of Reis’s style. However, Houghton’s interventions, with his highly individual and quirky selection of appropriated finds, have a very British signature on them.
Making sculpture is the ultimate commitment to embodiment.
The artist in conversation with the author, 2012.
Marilène Oliver addresses both the physical and psychological relationship between the human body and the technological parallel worlds of the virtual. Through altering and reconfiguring the boundaries of our reality and our identity she transports us into a highly analysed and dissected universe. Her work embodies this relationship manifesting in a variety of guises but always with the human form at its core. Her conceptualizing of different ‘datascapes’, including Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), Computerized Tomography (CT) and Positron Emission Tomography (PET) scan data, provokes a new way of understanding the connective tissue of ontological entity being eternally entwined with technology.
The virtual world provides no place for the physical body. As the boundaries between our virtual and real lives increasingly blur, the absence of the physical in the virtual space is destined to provoke changes in the physical body and in our relationship to it in the real world. My work centres around this relationship, seeking to explore and create ways of intimately representing the physical/digital body.
Extract from the artist’s statement, 2013.
The initial inspiration for Oliver’s unusual work was the medical dissection and technological documenting of a convicted criminal, Joseph Paul Jernigan, after his execution. Medical scientists used a dataset of cryosections, CT scans and MRI scans to create a ‘Visible Human’ from voxel strata. Oliver elucidates:
To create the dataset, Jernigan’s corpse was frozen and sliced so finely that it disintegrated to mush, leaving only digital photographs and scans. The images of his body were uploaded onto the internet allowing him to be viewed at anytime and any place (but never all at once); he was under constant threat of being copied or translated. I downloaded images of his body and printed them onto sheets of acrylic and then ‘put him back together again’. In making I know you inside out, Jernigan was relocated in
time and space; returned from a digital to analogue state; no longer decentralized, fragmented and prone, but centred, whole and upright.
Extract from the artist’s statement, 2013.
Heart And Womb, 2007, Marilène Oliver. Inkjet, screenprints in optichromic and interference ink on polycarbonate. 160 × 100 × 60cm. (Photo: Todd-White Art)
Dugout, 2013, Marilène Oliver. Laser cut and charred MDF, ink and adhesive. 220 × 45 × 60cm. (Photo: Pascal Helleu)
Oliver’s preoccupation with how flesh can be transposed into digital information requires her to work closely with radiologists, scientists and technicians. As an artist, she primarily seeks metaphors and poetic readings from the data transcripts, not strict anatomical analysis. However, in approaching repair of the fragmented body, she reveals a deep understanding of the human form. Identifying ethical and philosophical questions has come in tandem with her conceptual research extending to investigating ‘transhumanism’ and the development in robotics. Austrian futurist Hans Moravec’s writings have acted as a springboard for Oliver’s ideas.
In his book Mind Children, Hans Moravec suggests that the way for humans to survive in a post-flesh, data-based era is for them to download their consciousness to the datascape, leaving the physical body behind. My work responds to this hypothesis by asking how the body could be refigured, translated and preserved so that it too can enter (and reflect) the datascape. Digital medical imaging fragments the body, genetics breaks it down into code, electronic communication reduces interaction to emails, text messages – digital media breaks the body down into bytes. As a sculptor I attempt to repair the fragmentation and dislocation of the body brought about by medical imaging and electronic communication by using the digitized and coded body as material for making sculptures. I seek to reclaim the body from the contemporary medical and digital gaze to poetically subvert it and offer future relics of our increasingly digitized selves. Extract from the artist’s statement, 2013.
In Dervishes, Oliver’s dual passions of sculpture and printmaking are conjoined in a major work that reflects the notion of the datascape body as a kind of atrophied avatar. The aura of ephemerality that surrounds the sculpture evokes transient beings – created through the employment of dye sublimation printed on panels of glass organza, strung in sequence to visually rebuild the bodies, on a clear nylon line.
The impact of Oliver’s journey across continents is profound, markedly informing and shaping her research and artworks. This international perspective creates a global commentary on her universally important subject matter and its context. Oliver was born British but she has lived for significant periods in Brazil and Angola. She reveals, ‘Each place has influenced my work both in the way it has made me reassess the importance/role of the digitized body and also the materials and processes I choose.’ She found Rio de Janeiro liberated her practice, compared to the confines of London, and enabled her to express herself freely through carnival materials which were so readily available.
I came to Rio thinking I should surrender to fantasy and performance and allow it to help find innovative ways of materializing the DICOM database (which for me continues to be Melanix. I needed to readdress the balance of embodied (handmade, labour intensive, bodily learnt processes) and disembodied activity (working on the computer, exporting directly to machine) in my practice. My work should be fuelled by ‘Virtual Leakage’ and I need to allow objects to present themselves from ‘a back and forth exchange in which ideas migrate by osmosis’ (between the real and the virtual).
The artist in conversation with the author, 2012.
The sculpture Orixa embodies the Melanix dataset through an Afro-Brazilian portal of the Candomblé dance ritual. Layers of foam rubber are embellished with seed beads, horizontally stacked, arched and split open to receive a spirit. In contrast, Split Petcetrix is made using similar materials, but with vertical layering. Both sculptures possess a duality: rich and vibrant tactility that entreats, followed by a gentle rebuff when the subject matter is exposed.
In Dreamcatcher, Oliver extended the dataset to capture an exhausted carnival queen laid prone, created from layers of clear acrylic sheet. The fantastical narrative hides the digital intervention where the outline of Melanix scans had been converted to pixelated paths for laser cutting. She explains, ‘Dreamcatcher is a sculpture made up of close to 300 dreamcatchers. Each one is made using the profile of a scan from the Melanix dataset so that when they are installed they form a levitating figure, which floats above a cloud-like mass of feathers.’
This piece was later incorporated into a performance work, The Body in Question(s), curated and choreographed by Isabelle Van Grimde at the University of Quebec in Montreal, 2012. It is not surprising that Oliver includes collaborations with choreographers, as the main focus in her oeuvre is that of corporeal dialogue.
I see sculpture as a process of looking for poetic solutions that bring colour and life into the built environment.
The artist in conversation with the author, 2013.
Peter Freeman is a master at creating spectacular interactive light sculptures that radiate joy and exuberance. His works expand the language of sculpture through paradoxically holding a powerful visual presence that has no tangible corporeality. The works appear always in transformation mode through the creation of an invisible force field that enables the public to interact directly and thereby possess a degree of control to animate the sculptures.
I’m interested in exploring qualities of light and space, using electric light and digital technologies to create luminous forms that have a positive ambience in their locations. Sometimes they are independent objects with luminous surfaces that radiate into the surrounding space. Others are light installations that integrate into the architectural envelope and transform existing structures. They often include interactive technologies to allow them to respond to the presence of people and the environment. I like to think this encourages a positive relationship between object and audience and makes the sculpture reflexive in its location.
Extract from artist’s statement, 2012.
Redruth, Green, Blue, 2011, Peter Freeman. Installation Redruth, UK. Textile banner and DMX programmed LEDs. Collaboration with artist Tony Minion and Redruth School. Dimensions 5 × 6m. (Photo: Peter Freeman)
Twist ‘n’ Tilt, 2004, Peter Freeman. Wakefield, UK. 12000 × 120 × 120cm. Painted steel tower with animated multi-coloured fluorescent tubes. (Photo: Peter Freeman)
British-born Freeman harnesses the role of light in our urban environs by creating art in the public realm. He uses light as his muse to create a dialogue between the passer-by and an environment, or to punctuate a building. His father’s profession in the ministry inspired his work Luminous Motion – a commission for Winchester Cathedral. He comments, ‘My first memories of artificial light come from my family’s annual outings to see the Blackpool illuminations and the multitude of candles in my Dad’s church. This dual influence of the frivolous and the holy in the language of light continues to be a source of inspiration for my sculptures.’ For Luminous Motion he focused on the city’s position at the axis of religious and political pathways to deliver a thought-provoking columnar work made from mirrored polished steel pierced by 500 fibreoptic lights. The lights responded to mobile text messages contributed from passers-by, changing the formation of words and colours. The discourse created a tension in the context of the cathedral grounds and animated the environment for a younger audience. This adoption of society’s passion for techno-culture to transform public spaces is a preoccupation for Freeman.
The sculpture developed out of thinking about physical and spiritual pathways. I was impressed with the idea of Winchester as a city situated at the convergence of pathways, and how this gave rise to the city’s historical importance as a spiritual and political centre with its fantastic gothic cathedral. One of the inspirations for Luminous Motion is the medieval Christian idea of an Axis Mundi. This is the pivot at the centre of the universe, around which all creation rotates. It is also a symbolic silver thread that allows spiritual communication between heaven, earth and underworld.
For this project the emphasis is on modern routes, both real and virtual. I wanted to use contemporary light and new control technology to explore ideas of pathways and communication networks in the modern city through the language of light.
Extract from artist’s statement, 2003.
In 2007 Freeman was commissioned to create a dazzling punctuation with light for the former telephone exchange building in Penzance. The clients wanted to signify the building’s metamorphosis into an art gallery. Freeman, a resident in West Cornwall, took his inspiration from the peninsula’s embracing sea and sky, creating soft waves in diffused blues and greens. Lightwave, a fifty-five-metre glass facade pulsated with electric undulations ignited by the triggering of motion sensors as people walked by. The local weather also contributed to the background colour through a sensor sensitive to atmospheric conditions.
Light remains invisible until it is transformed by the eye and brain into a visual experience. In this subjective process the world we see is like a reflection of our own imagination. The advent of electric light gives us the possibility of totally new luminous forms.
Mostly electric light is used in banal repressive ways for work and commerce, but I’m interested in the liberating ‘wow’ factor of light and try to make light sculptures that playfully explore the symbolic nature of light to entertain and give form to a contemporary moment.
Extract from artist’s statement, 2012.
Redruth Green Blue expanded Freeman’s oeuvre in 2011 through a collaboration with textile artist Tony Minion and Redruth School Year ten pupils. Together they researched the industrial heritage of the town and then transfigured that onto a digitally printed building canvas, enhanced by lightemitting diodes of RGB quality. The giant banner showcases key architectural details selected by the team from a compilation of photographs taken by the students. It is illuminated by a strip of LEDs at the base of the installation that are programmed to change colour and evoke different moods.
I work closely with clients, local people, architects, manufacturers and urban planners. It’s a creative transaction between artist, audience and location, and the sculptural process becomes orientated to a synthesis, transferring what is exciting and valued in the surrounding culture into three dimensions.
The artist in conversation with the author, 2013.
Immersed in an endless, dark sea of thick, black pitch that presses against one’s chest with such a force that it penetrates through to the soul, adrift, we stumble upon unsettlingly familiar forms lying lifeless on the sea floor. Sculpture is what one is left with, once these encountered forms are wiped clean of the dark pitch that engulfed their whole being, and their revealing, true nature is presented in front of us.
The artist in conversation with the author, 2013.
Stelios Manganis is a dark storyteller who harnesses humour, laced with solemnity and subversion, to relay tales of emotional toil through his mechanical sculptures. His unsettling and provocative narrative questions the tension humans create between themselves and the machines they build. He investigates, through his own fixation, how the reading of this relationship illustrates our fundamental understanding of our own emotions. Through dismantling and rebuilding he creates surreal metamorphosed machines that intrigue with sinister intent.
I consider myself an explorer, an investigator of the mechanical genome. I am in the pursuit of a common genetic code – one shared by both the machine and us humans. This is a type of research much closer to pseudoscience, if you wish, so perhaps I am more of a mechanical alchemist and a raconteur than an artist. Yet the work must be able to maintain equipoise between wittiness, irony and one’s real intent through the work’s subversive nature. People might find it hard to grasp the seriousness behind my works at first glance. They may leave the viewer uncertain as to its very nature – is it comedy or tragedy? I would like to think that the messages in these works are thought provoking and emotionally unsettling.
The artist in conversation with the author, 2013.
Manganis’ fascination with machines is endogenous, going beyond the initial wonder at the mechanics, to the realms of profound introspection. He aims to provide insight into the mind/body/machine continuum by constructing seemingly functional, hybrid machine sculptures that are only completed through human encounter. He elucidates:
I am deeply interested in the way that we have been creating devices for centuries, in our image, after our likeness. These mechanisms are the fruits of our thought, and they seem to share qualities with our physical parts and biological activities.
The artist in conversation with the author, 2013.
The element of performance is generally not the role for the artist, instead his abnegation is deliberate – the viewer and machine entwined form this important facet. Manganis wants people to connect and ‘complete’ his work by engaging with it – to fill the void apparent. His ability to create such undercurrents, in what are seemingly familiar and benign components, shows his eye for erudite selection and assemblage of machine parts.
My sculptures seem incomplete unless the human form, namely the viewer, takes part in the dialogue initiated by the machine. Thus, they create a field of affective exchange. The ‘mechanomorphic’ sculpture sets a ghost in motion as it forms an ethereal extension to the viewer’s body and a channel through which psyche can be externalised. The potential present deep inside the machine is passed to the attendants as a current flowing through the field generated by one’s changing perception of what the machine represents.
The artist in conversation with the author, 2013
Manganis speaks of being mesmerized by particular machines, and feels not only chosen by the machine, but also compelled to acquire and engage intimately with it. He believes the encounter is transformed into a creative investigation when it, ‘…becomes a process of trying to uncover, not only the subconscious link to your psyche (and perhaps the experiential memory associated with it), but also to discover those specific forms and processes of the encountered machine which are responsible for the instantaneous recollection of this particular sensation.’
This search by Manganis likens itself to the quest to identify the machine’s genetic material and how that unravelling of its unique coding will release him from the trance. Endeavoring for synergy is a preoccupation - between the object and Manganis, and between the disparate objects themselves.
Digging deep into the heart of the mechanism feels as if I am playing around with the object’s genome so as to trigger a reaction from a form of energy which I feel confident does exist. Yet what strikes me the most about the image is the potential present in every single part, and the fact that this potential is the result of the deconstruction of the machine’s unique identity. I am bewildered by the ingenuity and
synchronisation of the machine’s mechanism. Just a few pivots, nuts, bolts and axles are able to compose this moving masterpiece in front of me. The concept seems to be so simple - and to an extent, it is – yet its simplicity is rather a mirage caused by the harmonious motion of its parts, as if these are athletes passing the baton to each other at exactly the right moment in an endless relay race. Suddenly the concept of this being a single machine is replaced by respect towards the multiplicity of the mechanism, in which a silent community of devoted parts performs its ceremonial duty of transferring energy from its spring - the turning wheel, the handle, the operator’s hand.
The artist in conversation with the author, 2012.
I know why the caged bird sings, 2009, Stelios Manganis. Birdcage, brass horn, razor blades, wood, metal. 9 × 19 × 38cm. (Photo: Stelios Manganis)
Any minute now, 2011, Stelios Manganis. Binding press, glass, wood, metal. 43 × 43 × 60cm. (Photo: Stelios Manganis)
In I know why the caged bird sings, Manganis coaxes the viewer through intriguing titling and unusual juxtaposition of familiar objects: a bird cage houses a brass horn circumnavigated by suspended razor blades referencing a musical mobile. The air is cut with the perceived screech from the blades as they scrape at the horn – the viewer’s imagination innocently turns the handle – both sculptor and participant in agony at the suggested metallic rendering that invokes sensations of torment. This is Manganis’ predilection and skill: to entreat, engage, and then profoundly unnerve.
The conflicting elements within the title and form are not there to expand the pool of possible interpretations or to make our understanding of it even more elusive. They stress the tension within the form itself. The conflicting insinuations are just echoes of the real conflict that is developed within the boundaries of the cage.
It is truthful and yet ironic, for the caged bird does not sing; it cries with a penetrating scream that reaches our soul, which in turn becomes our hearing aid. It is a razor-sharp scream and another truth within the irony itself.
The artist in conversation with the author, 2013.
His subversive manipulation succeeds through the ironic yet playful anaesthetic he prescribes through the quotidian - to penetrate the subconscious and value the insight. There is no sense of parody here – Manganis’ voice is clear and erudite – piercing sonic vibrations from an inner child.
Childhood is like a current that continuously flows through our body and mind – an indelible fingerprint embedded in our genes. And, even if its flow might have stopped, to set it back in motion, it only takes a slight push, or a turn of the spinning wheel. Our eventual friction with the social norm tends to suppress all kinds of habits from childhood. For some people my works are familiar impressions of distant forms and sounds emanating from the drawers within, long since locked away deep in the back of our mind. My dialogue with my childhood is what helps me see issues in greater clarity and honesty. As a consequence, the outcome is a refreshing thought, yet one that is generated through long-forgotten experiences.
The artist in conversation with the author, 2013.
The Self-contained Singer again captivates through titling and metaphor. The carrying case of a branded Singer sewing machine forms a symbolic motif as a reference to life as a journey, where we carry our emotions, memories and experiences. Manganis says, ‘…we become Singers of our life’s repertoire’. In this work the sewing machine case has been transformed into a sonic instrument by placing the loop of a metal grater through a music box movement. These dual interests with sound and the symbolic Singer sewing machine again were captured in The Conductor where the turning of the wheel delivers a child’s laughter.
For Manganis, his passion is creating a universal metaphysic through an eclectic blend of objets trouvé transformed into affective mechanical assemblages that evoke a latent and disturbing subtext.
Sculpture allows us to question what we believe we see and understand – the architecture of space and the world around us.
The artist in conversation with the author, 2012.
Liz West creates wonderlands saturated with pure vibrant colour. Her installations bathe the viewer in light and illustrate its power as a mood-maker. Few can resist the muscular embrace that colour and light have on our sense of wellbeing. West manipulates these two fundamentals with masterful effect, exhibiting control underpinned with a delicious playfulness. She comments, ‘My work gives you the opportunity to immerse yourself, moving away from the real into something that is magical that heightens your senses.’
The unexpected element – monotone objects that form the components of the structured cornucopia of hue – intrigues the viewer. As an obsessive collector of modern, single-colour paraphernalia that speaks of the quotidian, she acquires, collates and orchestrates ‘stuff’ on a grand scale.
For as long as I remember I have always been fascinated with colour. It is an innate passion of mine that I cannot define. It is always the saturated, brash, bright shades that I am most excited by rather than the more subtle tones in the spectrum.
Extract from interview about The predicament of in here and out there for Four exhibition, Cornerhouse, Manchester, 2013.
The psychology of colour forms a robust foundation to West’s practice. Research-led, informed by colour theory and light technologies, her work embodies a true marriage of artifice and illusion joined in harmony to manipulate and exploit characteristics of human perception of real and illusionary space. West reveals her fascination, ‘I am particularly interested in the intense and concentrated colour found in synthetic materials and in artificial light.’ She exploits the apparent ‘glow’ from such manufactured goods through clever harnessing of light to showcase colour in its raw state and thereby deliver unique immersive experiences. Her aim is to build environments that transport the viewer to become a participant ‘inside’ her work. A Manchester-based colour therapy group, who examined the meditative effects of the coloureddrenched rooms in the Chroma exhibition on the control of their thinking, explored this ambition. Curator Mark Devereux comments of the Chroma exhibition, ‘The joy is when you start looking deeper and further – discovering what someone else may not have seen.’
Consumed, 2013, Liz West. Installation Grosvenor Shopping Centre, Macclesfield (Barnaby Festival, June 2013). Wood, acrylic, fluorescent bulbs, foil, paint, objects. Dimensions variable. (Photo: Liz West)
Difference is Important: Blue Chamber 2012, Liz West. Installation BLANKSPACE Gallery, Manchester. Acrylic, mirror, objects, paint, coloured bulbs. Dimensions variable. (Photo: Liz West)
West celebrates one of our most human characteristics, that of gathering – we all collect to some degree – but unlike many artists (such as Tony Cragg in the 1980s) she is focused, not on worn or degrading plastics, but instead harvests goods that are new, clean and industrially manufactured – those that are easily found in the marketplace. Generally, it is the objects that we all use everyday without thinking about it that she is drawn to, with the caveat that they must be of a single hue. Collecting, ordering, classifying, coding and the multiple repeating of this assembly line of process is a structural backbone to her practice. She creates ordered systems leading to a clear definition of space and boundaries that form a signature in her highly organized installations.
I establish boundaries that determine both what is collected and where it is collected from. Accumulating and assembling single-coloured objects, I consider the psychological influence of colour, its effect and sensory impact upon the viewer.
Extract from artist’s statement, 2013.
When collecting monotone objects, she sets herself rigid parameters to follow, including where to stop in the colour spectrum and the permanency of the pigment. Embellishments, such as labels, dilute her message and distract from her aim – for the viewer to focus primarily on the impact of colour and form and consider the transformative effect of the assemblage. Secondary concerns are the actual components as individual elements and their prior identity and purpose. Lynne Green writes of Chroma, ‘The objects West works with have diverse uses, but it is their colour that determines their selection and juxtaposition. While they remain identifiable, together they transcend their prosaic identity in the generation of a new visual experience for both the artist and the viewer.’
In West’s Chamber series, a surreal landscape of everyday ephemera appears as a field stretching into infinity through the positioning of mirrors and constructs of light to create an endless vision. The magnetic draw of her work is commented on by George Mogg, curator at Beldam Gallery, ‘Visitors were instantly drawn to explore West’s installation – as a glowing sliver of yellow light could be glimpsed from across the space, people were pulled towards the work, placing their eye to the gap and submitting to the warmth of the Yellow Chamber.’ This series is very intimate, demanding the onlooker alter their posture or pose to engage – the reward – the revelation of something obscured.
In The predicament of in here and out there, commissioned by Cornerhouse, Manchester, the chamber notion is expanded by using an old wardrobe with the door ajar to arouse curiosity and reveal a shaft of light. The light entreats the viewer to stare into the closet and witness an illusionary sea of vibrant yellow objects stretching into infinity – made possible through a looped video on a high-saturation LED screen hidden inside the wardrobe. West’s endorsement of the value of playful encounters with colour and light is the essence of her dynamic oeuvre.
Difference is Important: Orange Chamber, 2012, Liz West. Installation BLANKSPACE Gallery, Manchester. Wood, mirror, objects, T5 Fluorescent bulbs, paint. Dimensions variable. (Photo: Iain Goodyear)
My work participates in a discussion that analyses and disentangles specific images of our culture about our children; it is about vulnerability and fragility.
Extract from artist’s statement, 2012.
Mary Giehl’s sculptures are imbued with a sense of haunting disquiet that evokes the conceptual foundations she addresses: dysfunctional relationships with children. Informed by her experiences and encounters in her first occupation as a paediatric nurse for twenty-two years, in a paediatric Intensive Care Unit and paediatric Emergency Department in the USA, her focus and inspiration are the infants and children she nursed.
Giehl is expert at finding an unusual, but highly appropriate, material to act as a metaphor for her message. Her material palette is diverse: candy, alum, soap, cloth and bronze; however, her artist’s voice is strong and resolute – a rare combination. Giehl’s work embraces the senses beyond the visual: the odoriferous and palpation qualities of her palette stimulate and reconfigure our perception.
In 2007 Giehl started experimenting with sugar to form a collection of children’s sculptural shoes. She was attracted to the attributes of sweets associated with infant characteristics – sweetness and innocence – and how the brittle form of the candy reflected the children’s fragile bodies and delicate natures. In Sweet, she manipulated a candy recipe to cast colourful infants shoes.
In the same year Giehl used soap to explore the complicated symbolism of children’s bath time. She recollects wonderful childhood memories of having fun and laughter taking baths with her two brothers. However, this image of the innocent idyll is tainted with evidence from news stories of infants being drowned in bathtubs. She combines the joy and the sadness of the activity in a potent installation entitled Ivory.
Her defining installation Crystal (2010) took the science of growing crystals from alum (potassium aluminium sulfate) to new levels when she developed processes to build 3D objects. For Giehl, the original fascination was the sparkling white particles that, when illuminated from within, beautifully echoed the ghostly qualities she was seeking to convey.
Ivory, 2007, Mary Giehl. Installation Everson Museum, Syracuse New York State. Three cast-iron baths, soap, water, nine digital prints. Dimensions variable. (Photo: David Broda)
Sculpture, to me, is a physical record of an emotive or psychic impulse ... I sculpt because I am driven to commit the sensation to something material and tangible.
The artist in conversation with the author, 2013.
Eliza Bennett’s sculpture has immediacy in connection and an intimacy through its corporeal quality and form. Her focus has a duality entwined: an emotional response to her father’s prolonged ill-health woven against the wonder at antiquities that are threaded throughout her life. Her parents worked in antique restoration so she spent her childhood at antique events and living in a home full of things ‘untouchable’ for fear of damage. She still enjoys rummaging through artefacts and antiquities, and finds them both inspirational in form and concept.
I think this has had some bearing on my interest in creating both tactile and transitory works. Sometimes the precious crafted artefact is exposed to a controlled element of chance. This move can bring the piece to a greater point of exquisite beauty, or destroy it completely.
Extract from artist’s statement, 2012.
Interior Object No. I Le Petite Bourgeois, 2012, Eliza Bennett. Wood, leather, studs, thread, wadding, buttons. 44 × 37 × 54cm. (Photo: Catherine Losing)
Pleading Affluenza, 2009, Eliza Bennett. Leather, thread, wadding, wood, bone, bespoke glass cabinet. 28 × 22 × 22cm. (Photo: Eliza Bennett)
British-born Bennett’s preoccupation with mirroring her own journey of discovery about the human condition is influenced by international philosophers Jean-Luc Nancy and Jean-Paul Sartre, and artists Frida Kahlo, Louise Bourgeois and Ana Mendieta. Wilhelm Reich has been a recent addition to this cohort, attracting Bennett’s attention through his philosophy of addressing the idea of healing the mind and body as a unitary system. Her belief in a holistic approach has focused her attention on making manifest the angst experienced when the inner sanctum is out of harmony with the external body: to create work that unsettles in its reflection.
My work is endowed with a narrative quality. Through a personally charged perception, I explore a range of issues relating to the formlessness of both individual and social reality. This evolves from a close reading of discourse and neuroses surrounding the condition of human existence. I translate the organic human body shape into elements accomplished by a distortion of what is known.
Extract from artist’s statement, 2012.
In Pleading Affluenza, Interior Object Le Grande Bourgeois and Interior Object Le Petite Bourgeois Bennett disembodies the human form to explore the notion of personified materialism. Harnessing her expertise in costume and theatrical prop making, she crafted luxurious materials, such a calf leather and hardwood, into seductive body parts. The referencing to the Victorian penchant for decadent furnishings – richly upholstered furniture in sumptuous brocades, and the foible of placing artefacts in glass cases – reflects the fashionable bourgeoisie in an age of decadence where extreme poverty was hidden. The concept to materialize the corrupting power of wealth and status that can lead to the demeaning of others without affluence, is a challenge to convey.
With my work I am looking to create an iconography of physical existence, concentrating on the wonder of the lived moment, looking to lift the intentional body to a state of reverence and worship.
Extract from artist’s statement, 2012.
What Has She Done With the Feeling?, 2013, Eliza Bennett. Wax, wood, velvet, pins. 10 × 30 × 18cm. (Photo: Eliza Bennett)
I am against object-making. I cannot bring myself to make objects. That is why most of this stuff is living and has a time component to it. These things are part of life.
The artist in conversation with the author, 2013.
Andre Woodward’s intriguing sculptures address the interconnectedness of man and nature. He reconfigures the mundane into multi-sensory installations that focus on the perception of reality, proffering a fascinating paradox of interconnectivity and individuality. His passion for understanding and conceptualizing systems has led to his oeuvre embracing unusual combinations of media that create a powerful force field.
I like to think of my work in terms of the natural human environment, which is very different from nature in its traditional sense. The concept of nature in relation to human existence has been inverted, where the natural world is a foreign, inhospitable place. The space inhabited by society is a new environment that controls certain aspects of nature.
As a result, a new natural human environment has been established. However, the truth of the matter is that our human environment is dictated by a perpetual struggle for control between the human and natural environments, where at any given moment one or the other will have the advantage. The true natural human environment is a dynamic equilibrium of this perpetual struggle. Ironically, the more we try to create our own nature, the more we contribute to the complexity of nature. It is as if what we perceive as nature does not really exist, because we are part of nature. Similarly, my work is its own living reality, while simultaneously being a representation of reality. Thus, the work is no longer merely an object mimicking a state of reality, but is an actual state of reality.
Extract from artist’s statement, 2013.
In Woodward’s sculpture the elemental dynamic, entwined with modern technologies, geological formations, building materials and living matter reflects a world in flux, struggling to find equilibrium. The material palette is rich in metaphor and meaning, each element carefully judged for its role to express his messages. The harnessing of audio to evoke an eerie, mystical quality to the work reinforces the visual tension. The trees are paradoxically a traditional icon of the natural world and yet a deliberate transient phenomenon. Time is an underpinning element in Woodward’s work with several juxtapositions: the natural growth and decay of the trees, the duration of the soundtrack and the control of the lighting system, interwoven with the viewer’s interaction time. Intrinsically, the artist wants to create controlled urban micro-ecosystems that mutate over time, leading to new synergies of expression.
Taste of Cindy & The Hardest Walk, 2009, Andre Woodward. Installation The Huntington Beach Art Centre. Bonsai trees, speakers, MP3 players, electronics, pumps, hoses, grow lights, steel. Dimensions variable. (Photo: John Santoni)
Darklands (1-3), 2011, Andre Woodward. Asphalt, audio electronics, mortar, MP3 player, olive tree and steel. Dimensions variable. (Photo: John Santoni)
California provides a stimulating and inspirational home for Woodward with its venerated natural and technological icons: the national parks of Death Valley and Yosemite contrast with Silicon Valley and Southern California. Their geographical proximity maps an interface that informs both the concept and the material palette in his work.
There is something magical that occurs in these pathways that connect our human environment with nature, but the true magic happens in the overlap of the two. So my work consists of materials that embody these environments by both origin and symbolism. That is why you will find things like an uprooted pothole or a large redwood slab being utilized as material. With the pothole you have a piece of a road that has been imprinted by the thousands of people that have travelled over it, leaving a physical record and literally pulverizing it into the form of a pothole. In the redwood slab you have hundreds of years of imprinted information recorded inside its rings. Both things are part of the environment and both carry the record of their existence and physical surroundings.
Extract from artist’s statement, 2013.
Don’t Ever Change, 2013, Andre Woodward. Redwood burr slab, steel, speakers, MP3 player, electronics, artificial quarts, paint, resin. 122 × 122 × 153cm. (Photo: Andre Woodward)
Sculpture is a solid way of articulating emotions and sensations that would otherwise be impossible to pin down.
The artist in conversation with the author, 2013.
Dorcas Casey captures the parallel world of the unconscious in dream-inspired hybridized sculptures of animals. She reveals, ‘No waking ideas seem to have the same natural vitality and urgency to them. Invariably the most potent facets of my dreams come as animals; it’s always been this way.’ A grave disquiet is expressed through the contorted forms and slumped poses that exude a strong spiritual aura, one that emphasizes the sculpture’s otherworldly nature. There is nobility, laced with sadness and a sense of longing, that is allpervasive; evoking a poignant obituary for someone or something unexpressed.
I feel like my subconscious is getting at something deeply buried and my conscious mind is piecing it together from a trail of clues on the surface. I like to think that there is some kind of idea forming that I don’t know about, some sort of non-rational process going on below the surface, which I must attempt to incubate rather than disturb.
The artist in conversation with the author, 2013.
The magnitude of Casey’s work suggests that the visual weight is endowed by the emotional heaviness, but she cleverly spikes some pieces with wit to retain their accessibility to the viewer. This approach is intuitive and belies the convoluted journey the sculptor has taken. She is obsessed with searching for 2D and 3D inspirational source materials to make the form, stating ‘the enigmatic, almost numinous, quality of the image is beguiling and seems to have a hold over me.’ A complex labyrinth of the psyche is mirrored in her work and the ability to harness it so eloquently is the foundation of her fascinating art practice in Britain.
I intend my finished work to be puzzling and disconcerting. I try to maintain the uncanny, enigmatic quality of the dream image, a very distinct object, but ambiguous and troubling. I like to surprise the viewer with the sudden recognition of a familiar material that has been transformed. I want my sculptures to be at once familiar, tactile and comforting, and conversely smothering, threatening and sinister. I’m interested in creating the discomfort of attraction and repulsion in the viewer.
The artist in conversation with the author, 2013.
Casey’s expert making skills mean she delivers intricate forms, through advanced pattern-cutting and stitching, that reference the animals of this world conjoined with those of the mythological. The sculptures come from familiar found materials and she imbues them with a message that nods to the notion that everyday domesticity has gone deeply awry. Her material palette is eclectic – choosing the markedly used and broken in preference for the unsoiled – she wants the connection with past lives to be embraced within the confines of her art. Hence old stained gloves, worn socks, torn knitwear, broken strings of pearls, damaged furniture and secondhand clothes all find a place in her creativity.
I like to think of the objects on the flea market as the physical counterpart of the ‘stuff’, which the psyche constructs into dreams: fragments of the past, strange juxtapositions, beloved objects, childhood recollections, the dilapidated remains of personal and collective memory. I see a correspondence between the vast ramshackle collections of old items on the market and the ubiquitous mental clutter at the back of your mind, where the images in dreams seem to originate; things from the past that have been halted and stored on their way to being discarded. For me these things seem to spill out of the same trove of matter and symbols that the psyche rummages through and drags out in dreams.
The artist in conversation with the author, 2012.
Casey’s attention to her dream world ignites the transfiguring of concepts and transformation of commonplace artefacts into art that possesses dynamic physical muscularity that has been lost through emotional vulnerability. In Bull, the powerful beast slumps, exhausted and immobilized – pathos incarnate. She reveals:
About a year after having a series of dreams about bulls and calves I went to study sculpture in Seville in Spain for four months. The omnipresence of the bull image in Andalucía, and the traditional sculpting skills I learned while I was there, led me to make this sculpture when I returned to England. I wanted the bull to appear awkward and propped-up, unnaturally weightless against a pile of rickety old chairs, suspended between power and inertia, halfway between strength and collapse.
The artist in conversation with the author, 2013.
Sow, 2011, Dorcas Casey. Hand-stitched found fabrics, stuffing, polymer clay, wire, old furniture. 125 × 100 × 90cm. (Photo: Alick Cotterill)
Leap, 2013, Dorcas Casey. Secondhand clothing, Jesmonite, pigment, wood, steel, bronze powder, found wooden saddle. 180 × 180 × 90cm. (Photo: Jasper Casey)
Sow has a similar presence where the symbolism of the animal dominates, drawing the viewer in, yet not revealing its exact meaning. The artist herself identifies ambiguity in the piece stating, ‘Sow is still ambiguous. I have resolved it visually and am glad it retains a level of mystery for me. Similar to a dream image it represents many facets of my situation intertwined in one image, simultaneously embodying a set of ideas and circumstances I find myself in, like a snapshot of a predicament or a temporary mind-set.’
As a child Casey enjoyed playing with puppets and dressing-up. A chance sighting in an ethnographic museum in Poland of giant animal heads used in folk rituals reminded her of her infantile passion and the dreams she had recently experienced of strange carnival costumes and oversized animal heads. The lofty placing of the animal heads in the Polish museum, the beasts looking down like bad-tempered gargoyles now redundant from their lively performance roles, inspired Casey to revisit the concept of animal symbolism and its haunting qualities. The tying-up of all these threads led to the creation of Familiar – a group of three large-scale sculptures that were placed in the outdoor arena for the Broomhill National Sculpture Prize 2013.
I constructed the sculptures from fragments of old clothes and blankets (much like a folk costume would have been made from worn out and torn-up domestic fabrics) and I specifically chose blankets and bedspreads that resembled ones from my childhood; linked to memories of comforting furnishings and bedding, and more specifically linked to a personal memory of old blankets kept under the stairs which me and my siblings used as props for elaborate imaginary games. I was interested in the personal and universal connotations of transformation, hiding, rituals and play, present in the draped blankets. I wanted the heads to seem playful and malevolent, much like the animals in my dreams appear. I wanted them to be sited in a sinister little huddle – not really interacting with, or looking at, each other – giving the impression that there could be someone hiding inside them and that they have the potential to suddenly move.
The artist in conversation with the author, 2013.
My work is about history and then becomes history. The artist in conversation with the author, 2012.
Catherine Bertola’s artistic terrain is landscaped in ephemeral materials that reference not the physical present, but the notion of the imprint of past lives. Through the enquiry into the historical, domestically defined interiors are meticulously researched: artefacts and furnishings, legends and myths, rituals and stories. All are rendered in Bertola’s penetrating gaze and transposed into reductive fragments that echo a narrative of the fleeting marks of time. She creates presence through sound, performance (captured through still photography) and physical motif. The interventions that transpose the symbolic patterns of wallpaper, curtains or carpets into temporal dust installations are her artistic British signature.
Underpinning the work is a desire to look beyond the surface of objects and buildings, to uncover forgotten and invisible histories of places and people, as a way of reframing and considering the past.
Extract from artist’s statement, 2012.
Dust is omnipresent in interiors – its base nature sees it defined as dirt: the unwanted, unsightly remains of the body and times past. Its use evokes a very particular aesthetic that at first captivates by its wonder, leading to repugnance at its recognition. Bertola draws with dust, creating magnificent renditions of patterns evocative of the site she is depicting to highlight her chosen thread. Installations After the fact, The Property of Two Gentlemen and Layer/s, lost without trace illustrate her expertise at delivering an unspoken dialogue. The historic role of women in the domestic arena – the substance of mundane graft and repetition of chores in the home are in counterpoint to the refined pastimes of affluent ladies in a bygone era.
My work is about labour, investing time in a very ordinary material. I use daily domestic activities or chores such as vacuuming and dusting to make my work. The manual labour involved adds value to something that usually gets swept away. I use dust as a mechanism for storytelling – dust is often described as being the matter of history, a residue or fragment that enables you to reflect on the past.
Extract from Out of the Ordinary: Spectacular Craft, V&A exhibition catalogue 2008.
Bertola’s drawings are intense fabrications that require painstakingly detailed work and repetitive labour. A commission in Sheffield examining the declining steel industry led her away from dust to consider other drawing materials. In Bit by bit, piece by piece, she created a textured carpet out of large dressmaking pins that mapped the designs of traditional cutlery handles. The carpet’s intensity reflects her making ethic and echoes its metaphorical content.
Bertola’s art works within the rhetoric and materiality of domesticity, not to undermine it but to complexify and deepen the viewer’s relation to it. It does this through a materialised narrative.
Extract from Trevor Keeble
Fabricating the Domestic Surface: a very brief history of an old problem, 2005.
After the fact (detail), 2006, Catherine Bertola. Installation derelict eighteenth-century farmhouse in Bicker, Lincolnshire. Found dust and sound. Dimensions variable. (Photo: courtesy the artist, Workplace Gallery and Galerie M+R Fricke)
Layer/s, lost without trace, 2009, Catherine Bertola. Installation Temple Newsam, Leeds. Collected dust, glue, paper and tacks. Dimensions variable. (Photo: Jerry Hardman Jones, courtesy of the artist, Workplace Gallery and Galerie M+R Fricke)
Bit by bit, piece by piece, 2009, Catherine Bertola. Commissioned by Millennium Galleries, Sheffield as part of Out of the Ordinary: Spectacular Craft exhibition. Pins, cutlery, bull dog clips, fringing, paper, foamboard, mdf. 250cm diameter. (Photo: Carl Rose, courtesy of the artist, Workplace Gallery and Galerie M+R Fricke)
It is about ‘being there’ and at the same time viewing it from afar, yes in a way I am both the viewer and the participant.
Extract from artist’s statement, 2013.
Noam Ben-Jacov is an Israeli-born artist working in the Netherlands who has brought a fresh perspective to the interface of sculpture and performance art. He is preoccupied with expanding these two worlds through manipulating the relationship between the body, the sculpted object and the space between and within. His work is autobiographical: an oblique response to his experiences – a spatial diffusion where the performer’s body moves under his control and in direct contact with his own crafted artform. The sculptures provide defined boundaries, both physical and as metaphysical frames of reference. His early training as a jeweller let him hone his craft skills and introduced the notion of extending the body. Since then his experiential arc has focused on the body as a central core from which the works radiate and pulse.
The sculptures possess mathematical majesty, which is enhanced when animated through rhythmic performances that he films. He manages the collaboration between body, object and space with patience and time: for Ben-Jacov contemplation, revision, reduction and minimization are essential. Some pieces take two years to complete. This meditative quality is exuded in the pieces and in his choreography that balances the elements into a holistic rhapsody.
The object and the body must balance and unite as one unit.
The artist in conversation with the author, 2012.
Nuances of scientific referencing are evident through his manipulation of gravitational pull, mass and form. Spheres, ovoids and ellipses are favoured shapes that refract and reflect in harmony. Yet his adherence to an almost reverential quality of line and beauty is in direct conflict to the importance he places on the animators that must ‘exude character and reflect human faults’. This preference for a deliberate disjuncture continues in the music where he insists it ‘must not be real music, but a series of notes that complicate the experience’. It is this ‘layering’ of the performance that evokes the life event/experience he is aiming to convey.
Triangulous, 2006, Noam Ben-Jacov. Aluminium, steel, nylon. Dimensions variable. Dancer Bennie Bartels. (Photo: Noam Ben-Jacov)
Soloin 3, 2012, Noam Ben-Jacov. Aluminium, nylon. 250 × 250 × 250cm. Dancer: Bennie Bartels. (Photo: Noam Ben-Jacov)
The one that confronts, approves and regulates: that dictates, governs and sanctifies: that threatens, challenges and compromises my mortal dimensions and scale, is the one I name ‘sculpture’.
The artist in conversation with the author, 2012.
Rachael Allen is a British artist who specializes in creating provocative miniature sculptures of symbolic objects that express the life-affirming moments we all experience. For her, the fascination with the human condition forms the thread underpinning her research – she moulds the psychological and the biological, then ties it off with a memento mori message. One of the artist’s favourite quotes by John B. Ravenal reveals a key to her approach, ‘Perhaps only at birth and death – the fine line separating presence from absence – does life’s fragility become readily apparent.’ Vanitas: Meditations on Life and Death in Contemporary Art Outer and Inner Space, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, USA (2000).
The intimate juxtaposition of familiar objects, commonplace in the domestic, clinical and mortuary settings, are meticulously and painstakingly rendered in miniature scale. Created from ordinary materials derived from the everyday, they exude a humble appearance while imparting potent morals about our irreversible, inevitable journey from ‘the cradle to the grave’. Sentimental in relation to childbirth and juvenile times, or with reference to debilitating age, illness, disease and death, they provide a platform for the projection of one’s own authentic experience of life. The objects nourish lived experience and are inseparable from the thoughts, feelings and associations anchored by them.
Extract from artist’s statement, 2013.
Untitled (hospital bed and NG feeding pump), 2009, Rachael Allen. Mixed media. 9 × 5.3 × 6.5cm. (Photo: Jac Scott)
Allen’s preoccupation with scale derives from a well-informed edict that endorses the impact of the miniature to capture the essence of a monumental narrative. She believes, ‘It has the capacity to create an “other time”, one that prohibits change and the instability of lived reality. Adopting the miniature scale thus provides an effective platform to communicate moral ideas about life/death within a diminutive, ordered world, away from external chaos.’
A series of tiny wheelchairs, pushchairs and prams were crafted as a family of objects to relate the narrative of the ‘cradle to the grave’. These were presented in scenarios depicting commonplace accidents. Allen places the vehicles at the centre of the tragedies, leaving the inference of any human presence as an ambivalent absence. She says, ‘To be drawn to these unique, animated vehicles is to enter a diminutive world where annihilation rubs all around; they embody a vulnerable and defenceless presence; a mirror reflection of our own transient existence.’
In her research she critically engages with medical science, actively spending time in university anatomy laboratories studying the preserved cadavers and anatomy pedagogy. For her, this interaction creates an internal dialogue that both disturbs and intrigues, but which is resolutely not macabre. Allen’s interest extends to the machinery that enables medicine to operate and treat, such as chemotherapy chairs, obstetric tables, incubators, operating tables, and even mortuary tables, coffins and refrigeration cabinets for the deceased.
At the heart of the work is the exploration of the human body as not solely the object of disease diagnosis, but the chief of an illness narrative. The absence of a miniature patient body is important here; each miniature medical model is a handheld metaphor for the physician’s rigorous attention on the tools of their trade to treat a diagnosed condition, more than a person embodying pain, which is remote from their patients’ own narrative.
Extract from Rachael Allen’s Narrative of Medical Miniatures, 2013.
The immediacy of our connection with Allen’s work belies the complexity and depth of both her research and construction skills. She has a fine critical eye that perceives microscopic detail, and the talent to transpose this into both two (her realistic pencil drawings are her trademark) and three dimensions. Allen is a master maker of the exquisite object, capable of employing everyday materials into honed micro-worlds imbued with meaning and metaphor. The tiny sculptures act as a haunting, yet also a beautiful and insightful, guide to the mind/body continuum, while sparking tensions and questions about society’s uncomfortable relationship with axioms: ill-health and death.
Untitled (chemotherapy chair), 2013, Rachael Allen. Mixed media. 6.2 × 5 × 10.5cm. (Photo: Rachael Allen)
Untitled (obstetric labour table and Entonox cylinder), 2010, Rachael Allen. Mixed media. 9.6 × 3.2 × 10cm. (Photo: Rachael Allen)
In 2009 her work became directly autobiographical, focusing on a hospital bed and a nasogastric feeding pump, both made in miniature in Untitled (hospital bed and NG feeding pump). A history of eating disorders led to repeated hospitalization and the responsive sculpture reflects the vehicle her treatment encompassed. Allen explains, ‘The contrast between psychological and physiological treatment is the principal metaphor explored in this piece. The invasive nature of the feeding device beside the clinical platform for slumber contrasts the emotional manifestation of my experience.… To acknowledge this as a treatment for a mental illness amplifies the relationship between body and medicine where the real-attempt to recover my disordered internal self was administered by a nauseating medical treatment used to recover my external body.’
Untitled (incubator), 2008, Rachael Allen. Mixed media. 10 × 5.3 × 8cm. (Photo: Rachael Allen)
Titling of her sculptures is a subject Allen has strong views about – she elects always to use Untitled, followed by the common name of the object in brackets. The decision to leave the artwork nameless and free of associations is made to entice the viewer to interpret their own meaning. Allen believes this creates a more intriguing bond between the two and thereby engenders potency.
I like to imagine that if these miniature medical models had a voice, they would speak the language of pain, anguish, concern, frustration, conflict and dilemma that pervade the experience of medicine for patients, carers and often physicians. They [the sculptures] enter the health humanities domain by virtue of communicating the predicament of modern medicine in its approach to illness experience, and the requisite for more human-centred methods that honour the patients’ stories. The artworks prompt narrative recollections and ignite conversations among their viewers; fostering momentary communities who are inspired to share experiences, thoughts and feelings about the work. The miniature artworks probe these issues by entertaining both our visual and intellectual perceptions, and stimulate dynamic debates surrounding humane medicine from both the (absent) patient and practitioner terrains.
Extract from Rachael Allen’s Narrative of Medical Miniatures, 2013.
Untitled (quince buggy), 2008, Rachael Allen. Mixed media. 12.5 × 5.5 × 17cm. (Photo: Rachael Allen)
Sculpture is something that I look at with an intuitive desire to touch it – I am completely drawn to it – without needing to read an explanation to understand it.
The artist in conversation with the author, 2013.
Andrea Hasler’s sculptures enrapture, with an unsettling corporeality that pricks at the primal. There is a delicious allure that pervades – igniting the polarities of revulsion and intrigue within the confines of her palette. The enticement for engagement, despite the lurid spectacle, is compulsive – the artist is in control.
A lot of my work centres on the notion of how to depict the emotional body. I am very fascinated with the psychological aspect of consumerism and its emotional link to the ‘abject’.
I am intrigued by the borderline between attraction and repulsion, something that is aesthetically desirable yet revolting at the same time. The viewer is confronted with contradictions – and in particular, with his or her own taste. Where does attraction end and repulsion begin?
Extract from the artist’s statement, 2013.
For Swiss-born Hasler, wax has been her creative weapon of choice since 2002 – this material muse enables her sculptures to exude their seductive, flesh-like qualities. She creates the pieces through the multiple layering of tinted hot wax over a timber/resin armature. The palette of flesh tones and the carving of the wax to echo body parts of a hybrid nature confront us in profoundly disturbing human-sized works. She challenges our own preconceptions of not only our own body image, but also of how that can be distorted through exposure to the notion of ideal beauty.
Hasler illuminates the acceptance of cosmetic procedures into mainstream society in Full Fat, or Semi-Skinned? The installation’s pivotal point is a hospital trolley resplendent with elements evoking a pulsating breast machine: a giant primary organ, silicon breast implants studded with diamonds, bottles, connected with tentacles of hydraulic tubing leading to baby bottle teats. She says about the work:
Breasts trigger a yearning for safety and security, attachment and belonging – the moment a mother’s breast no longer nourishes – experiences of loss and the sensation of separateness is felt. Perhaps this lies at the root of our obsession about what breasts are or what they should be – because ‘breasts only’, without the entire conglomerate of associations of longing and lust, do not exist. This installation shows versions of a body design that necessitates a radical intrusion into the innermost parts of humankind. Most inner parts have been turned outside, outward parts turned inside, both blending into one. As possibilities of modeling and perfecting the body’s surface have become endless as well as financially affordable, the question arises how exclusiveness, decadence, wealth or the desire for an individually controlled and designed physicality can nonetheless be expressed.
Extract from the artist’s statement, 2013.
Irreducible Complexity/Solo Act, 2011, Andrea Hasler. Wax, wood, resin, polystyrene. 35 × 60 × 65cm. (Photo: Sheyi Bankale, courtesy of the artist and Next Level Projects)
Full Fat or Semi-Skinned?, 2004, Andrea Hasler. Installation Artrepco Gallery, Zurich, 2004. Metal hospital trolley, wax, resin, hydraulic tubing, baby bottle teats. Dimensions variable. (Photo: Raphael Hefti, courtesy of the artist and Artrepco Gallery)
A feminist agenda is not what Hasler is focused on, although this subject is one which she sometimes is asked about; instead it is the exploration of the notion of identity and how that manifests itself in wealthy societies. She regularly returns to the decadence of affluence– in Burdens of Excess she manipulates icons of luxury goods with grotesque surgical mutilations of disembodied components. The designer bags and shoes, viewed as symbolic items of desire, acquisition and wealth, are transformed with wax body parts embedded with emblematic logos.
I play with visions of the future, scenes of surgical fetishes and glamour that can be purchased and harnessed with the tragedy of our own longing. I unsettle the viewer with carefully staged and naturalistic wax reproduction of human bodies and organs.
The objects remind us of strictly limited accessories on show in a luxurious designer boutique. What characterizes these works is the sensitive assumption that – behind the smooth surface – an abyss of hidden desires and forbidden passions can be hidden, a major conflict between the search for identity and the pleasure principles, between social constraints and personal ambitions.
Extract from the artist’s statement, 2013.
Irreducible Complexity offers us a labyrinth of sexual overtones underpinning the congealed and mutilated body parts – asking questions about the body politic in the twenty-first century. The sculpted wax figures grow in and out of each other exploring the flesh and the entanglement with relish. Hasler speaks of the series:
These intertwined bodies appear to have almost wrestled themselves together: their existence is a balancing act. Despite the apparent chaos at first sight, these sculptures speak of unity and discrepancy, beauty and debauchery. One is brought into a world that seems thoroughly concealed in the body politics, open only to itself encountering a forced existence.
Extract from the artist’s statement, 2013.
Her joy of skin as a necessary organ that wraps and contains, while acting as a vehicle of adornment and mutilation by society, is manifest. She is absorbed by the physicality of the epidermis and how it divides the inner and outer self. Mimicking the innate qualities of skin in her work is a skill she has honed well to make for an uncomfortable interplay between sculpture and viewer. Hasler has filmed the audience and captured the wrestling of irresistible palpation with horror and disgust. She delights in posing questions of boundaries towards our own bodies:
My work poses new questions: How much can our body take? Will we sacrifice everything for beauty? Which kind of person do we wish to be tomorrow? Which identity to chose? How much money will we spend for it? The viewer is confronted with contradictions – and in particular, with his or her own taste.
Extract from the artist’s statement, 2013.
Handbag 01, 2013, Andrea Hasler. Deconstructed designer handbag, wax. 35 × 38 × 35cm. (Photo: courtesy of Andrea Hasler, and Gusford, Los Angeles)
High Heels 01, 2013, Andrea Hasler. Deconstructed designer shoes, wax. 20 × 20 × 22cm. (Photo: courtesy of Andrea Hasler, and Gusford, Los Angeles)
Handbag 02, 2013, Andrea Hasler. Deconstructed designer handbag, wax. 28 × 35 × 22cm. (Photo: courtesy of Andrea Hasler, and Gusford, Los Angeles)
Sculpture is a mode of communication and a response to the world through material, time and space.
The artist in conversation with the author, 2012.
Awst & Walther create political and metaphysical statements through examining the relationship between the body, time and space. In their work they mould sculpture, installation and performance into visually and materially seductive events. The artworks possess a tension engendered by two voices pushing at the boundaries of their mediums. The duo of Welsh-born Manon Awst and German-born Benjamin Walther have worked in close collaboration since 2006 after they met in Berlin. The confluence of their backgrounds in architecture and theatre is palpable: strong geometric forms counterbalance the animated curve of the flesh.
…experiences come through in the exacting architectural understanding of how bodies, objects and surrounding space interact with each other, in conjunction with how performance often activates much of our sculptural work and creative processes; pushing the boundaries of what is defined as sculpture.
The artist in conversation with the author, 2012.
Latent Measures is a series of works that is continually evolving. The collection explores territories of conflict against the values of governing systems that demand socio/political constraint. Awst & Walther let the elemental narrative underpin the evident conceptual frames of reference. The incorporation of the forms and materials that speak of the built environment are juxtaposed with a visceral palette that animates a potent dialogue. In Latent Measures Component 1, the performance is initiated by the audience entering a harsh, metal micro-world that manipulates their perceptions, creating a spatial anomaly. Two parallel, mirrored steel sheets return a fractured reflection through punctuated perforations in the steel. For Component 17 a nineteen-metre aluminum pole dissects a series of rooms at a juncture that disrupts the normal flow around the spaces: deliberately creating a confronting environment.
When we began experimenting with different materials we were searching for visceral stuff. That gelatine is a pure protein really attracted us – it represents strength and structure, yet it has an inherent vulnerability through its materiality. It’s derived from the skin and bones of animals and has a very shiny glossy surface when it’s cast. It is actually reflective so there is an element of narcissus to it.
Extract from interview ‘Delivering to the Moment’
with Ana Finel Honigman in Sculpture magazine, May 2012.
Work in Progress was commissioned by the German Embassy in London to mark the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. To symbolize the on-going process of unification the artists created a wall of ice bricks surrounded by construction fencing. The sculpture delivered a shimmering performance that, over the course of a day, halted all traffic outside the Embassy in Central London, as the structure slowly melted.
The recurrent use of ephemeral materials like ice, Earth, and gelatine give the works a performative quality: they inherit a life of their own after they ve left our hands.
Extract from artist’s statement, 2012.
Work in Progress, 2009, Awst & Walther. Installation commissioned by the German Embassy, London. Ice, resin sphere, security fences, traffic equipment, signage, tower light. Dimensions variable. (Photo: Awst & Walther)
Latent Measures (Component 11), 2011, Awst & Walther. Installation Hannah Barry Gallery, London. Gelatine, pigment, aluminium pole, plywood, nails. Dimensions variable. (Photo: Damien Griffiths)
Sculptures begin as tiny, private ideas then expand and change – it’s the unexpected encounters, new juxtapositions of materials revealing something different and unexpected that makes the process so exciting.
The artist in conversation with the author, 2013.
Andrew Burton is a sculptor whose work resonates with a profound sense of humanity, illustrated in his advocacy of collaborative work, with his choice of natural materials, and in his adoption of ‘handmade architecture’ as his process. A poetic dialogue between the three facets is harmonized in apparently simple forms made from multiples of organic components – clay, bamboo, cow dung and chilli peppers.
Burton lives in the north of England, a region that speaks to him through its rural vernacular architecture, like the ‘stell’ (a rudimentary circular sheepfold): a recurring inspiration. As his gaze has wandered overseas, he has fed his interest in ancient and simple building techniques to make social and political commentary.
The idea of the visibility of making has become a strong theme in my work that dates back to early trips to India. I loved the organic sense of the architecture there and the way that the action of the human hand is visible in so much – the way that the act of making is revealed in many objects. Though equally, one of the appeals about my home in the north of England is the directness of making, literal functionality that one finds in a lot of old rural buildings.
The artist in conversation with the author, 2012.
In her essay Monuments to Transience, Gayatri Sinha situates Burton’s practice in India:
… where the avidly expanding city meets the rural hinterland; where the collision of time and history meld to create a gentle accretion of culture and sociology; here termite mounds, heaped up cakes of cow dung, or circular piles of unbaked bricks all begin to resemble one another as the natural accretions of the Indian landscape.
Identifying a preferable ‘light environmental footprint’ by using locally sourced, cheap, readily available materials in whichever country he was working in, Burton developed a deeply embedded site-specificity to his work. As many Asian countries march forward, establishing themselves as powerful nations in the global economy, Burton’s interest has turned backwards to the once highly prized craft skills that are practiced locally. Engaging local, highly skilled craftspeople to genuinely collaborate (sometimes navigating challenging protocols and customs), has become his remit when abroad. This political statement, as much as an artistic one, underlines his value and respect for traditional construction techniques and the human touch. Language barriers are overcome with the sharing of drawings and much hands-on experimentation hence the process delivers a truly conjoined outcome that resonates of the site, its peoples and the artist.
Low technology is important. One of the aspects of the project, Making Bithooras, in India in 2011 was using cow dung and charcoal, with absolutely no technology. The cow dung came out of the cow and was collected by women. They shape it by hand into plate-sized pancakes. Each one bears the handprint, the clearest evidence of the process of manufacture – what more declarative of hand made can you get? The women stack up thousands of the cow dung pancakes, called ophlas, into marvellous houseshaped objects – bithooras. At the end, a layer of raw cow dung is smeared, prodded, pummelled into the surface then decorated with disc-shaped mirrors.
The artist in conversation with the author, 2012.
In 2006 Burton was commissioned by the British Council in Delhi to create his personal artistic response to India. The Land of Ants and Bees project engaged local bamboo breakers and basket weavers to work with Burton to create curvaceous giant forms made of bamboo and chilli peppers. He explains:
Making Bithooras, 2011, Andrew Burton. Installation National Craft Museum, Delhi, India. Cow dung, charcoal, mirrors. Dimensions variable. (Photo: Andrew Burton)
In India, I’d been struck by bees’ nests hanging in ruined temples and palaces. I was intrigued by the way that although they appear stable simple forms, on closer inspection they are continually shifting shape as the surface is swarming with bees. Also dangerous, intangible and, in a way emblematic of India: untouchable and defying clear comprehension. I wanted to find a way of capturing something of the bees’ nest in sculpture. I chanced on a market selling chilli peppers and thought that they could be used to express something of what I’d seen in the bees’ nests – something unfathomable, but also vivid and captivating. In themselves, the chilli peppers were only a part of what I was looking for, but in combination with bamboo, which offered volume and form, they worked.
The artist in conversation with the author, 2012.
In his reading of the monumental in sculpture, Burton does not treat us to the usual extravagance but instead hands us unstable, roughly built giant vessels or teetering walls. The sculptures possess a corporeality that demands to be touched, engendering an innate pulse of the primal. With Jug in 2008, Burton built a two-metre-tall vessel from clay bricks, cement, steel and paint in the middle of Canary Wharf. It’s diminutive size appears further dwarfed by the business edifices – despite this Jug stands awkwardly proud, with its rugged edges and rudimentary crafting, juxtaposed against the clean, modern graphic of the steel and glass of London’s Docklands. Burton elucidates, ‘Jug was rebuilt from fragments and clumps of accreted bricks used in earlier sculptures. I liked the play of this kind of ragged disorganized modular structure seen against the background of much slicker architecture of Canary Wharf. The idea of the jug goes back to India where vessels are found everywhere and where water needs to be carried a distance, but I liked the idea of combining this with a more architectural structure.’
Burton’s fondness for buildings in a state of collapse has guided his evolving portfolio of transient walls made from miniature fired-clay bricks. Correlation of his oeuvre with US artist Charles Simmonds (who built dilapidated, miniature brick landscapes in the 1970s), is a purely superficial alignment, Burton suggests, as his own approach is uncomplicated by the prettification of dioramas – his message is more oblique. Burton’s temporary structures are built, painted and then dismantled and stored until they are transported then reerected in a different formation on a new site. Burton became less interested in creating and collecting his permanent sculptures some years ago – he decided that by reusing many of the bricks, they not only became richer with a narrative of layers of paint and held an allure of worn patina, but this approach also endorsed his philosophy for recycling and reuse.
UJug, 2008, Andrew Burton. Installation Jubilee Park, Canary Wharf, London. Fired clay, glaze, pigment, cement, steel. 225 × 170 × 80cm. (Photo: Andrew Burton)
My interest in the relationship between archaeology and sculpture is not so much to do with digging things up that have been hidden, as in the way that things that remain visible over time change – or retain – their meanings. I am interested in the rescue and reuse of objects and materials. I have been working on a series of ‘brick’ sculptures (but where the bricks are tiny) which are sequentially developed so that the sculptures go through a series of transformations: the same bricks are used to make different works, each one made from the residue of the last. As each new sculpture is painted, or cemented or glazed, layers of colour or matter gradually accrete on the surface, a patina is gradually built up, evidence of earlier incarnations.
The process began in India, where I became interested in the processes of brick manufacture. In India, little is left to waste – bricks are always recycled into new buildings. In Delhi I came across one neat stack of old bricks. Many of these were painted a particular blue colour on one side. Any Indian person would immediately recognize this blue as the blue that many Brahmins use to paint their houses. In this instance, those fragments of paint that remain on the surface of the bricks will hold a particular meaning.
In 2011, Burton expanded his portfolio to build a temporary sculpture in the form of a buttress against a modern brick building in Ontario, Canada. The commission for Cafka, Protect and Survive, a public art event, took core elements from his practice and intensified them. The result was an exuberant explosion of colour, created by the reconfiguring of bricks painted by local graffiti artists, and a powerful physical statement. Burton elucidates on his website:
Buttress is conceived as a vividly coloured architectural structure. As the name suggests, the sculpture is about buttressing – a structure that lends support to other structures. Buttress is formed from a rearrangement of bricks painted by Ontario-based street artists: graffiti, often seen as being symptomatic of a dysfunctional cityscape, becomes an integral ingredient to a structure that appears to lend stability to the existing architecture. Against the uniform colouring of the original brick building, the vibrant colours of Buttress create an exhilarating contrast.
Burton’s practice is embedded in anthropology and its tensions with modern values of elemental building and craft skills. Both political and social commentary is delivered on the world stage through his monumental sculptural narrative that captures the essence of his mark and his message.
Land of Ants and Bees, 2006, Andrew Burton. Installation British Council, Delhi, India. Bamboo, chilli peppers, mirrors, paint. Dimensions variable. (Photo: Andrew Burton)
Stell, 2007, Andrew Burton. Installation Northumbria University Gallery, Newcastle. Fired clay, paint. 400 × 400 140cm. (Photo: Andrew Burton)
Making Bricks, 2006, Andrew Burton. Making bricks in Madhya Pradesh, India. (Photo: Andrew Burton)
Pen, 2011, Andrew Burton. Installation Maladrerie St Lazaire, Beauvais, France. Handmade and manufactured bricks, glaze, paint. 500 × 500 × 220cm. (Photo: Andrew Burton)
Buttress, 2011, Andrew Burton. Installation Cafka, Kitchener, Ontario, Canada. Rearranged bricks painted by local graffiti artists. 300 × 300 × 50cm. (Photo: Andrew Burton)
Sculpture speaks to me of the three-dimensional observations on the incidental characteristics and overlooked elements of our built environment.
The artist in conversation with the author, 2012.
Janet Curley Cannon’s art focuses on the erosion of place: much of her recent work acts as a regional monograph of her adopted home, Bracknell. The grit of the urban environment has always been an inspiration for artists and for Curley Cannon it is the pull of the found geometric pattern in architecture that is her muse. Originally from Seattle, USA, the city that ignited her passion for pattern in the built environment, she has travelled across continents, noting the derelict and abandoned structures on her way. She is drawn to the layers of destruction as signifiers of a wider cultural malaise.
I work with the accidental, the incidental and the transitory fragments of the recent past left behind in forgotten places around a city. It is in the areas of decline or neglect where a city reveals the detritus of human culture, creating an ever-changing visual montage of modern society. The aged surfaces are layered canvases holding the clues to the habits and routines of contemporary urban life.
Extract from artist’s statement, 2012.
Curley Cannon draws on a range of media to create her artistic responses. Trained in printmaking, but finding two dimensions stifling, she gradually developed a way of manipulating the 2D plane to evoke a 3D perspective. In Urban Boundaries, a series of site-specific interventions in Bracknell town centre, she plays with our perceptions of what urban space is configured by. Adopting the empty shops (she had her studio in one) and posing an alternative viewpoint, she is posting a loud political and social commentary. In the sculpture On New Dead End Street the message is laced with irony: Curley Cannon intends the piece to exude echoes of a Victorian folly as it resides in a splendid country estate as part of a garden sculpture trail. Trompe l’oeil effects cleverly camouflage the temporary polystyrene construction – distance aids the illusion. This disjuncture between visual mass and physical weight is part of the sculptural language she enjoys. In On New Dead End Street the immediacy of the form and its message belies its disturbing substrata of gloom.
I am interested in recording the traces of modern life we leave behind: the painted layers or forgotten marks slowly decomposing on surfaces and structures, and the accumulation of printed material left to disintegrate in the public domain.
The artist talking to Richard Noyce in From Critical Mass: Printmaking Beyond the Edge, 2010.
Found building detritus was assembled to create broken geometric patterns in the sculpture The Grey Zone. Referencing the increase in desolate shopping centres, full of abandoned businesses and crumbling architecture, the piece stands as a lugubrious monument to hard times and society’s neglect of infrastructure in our towns and cities.
On New Dead End Street, 2011, Janet Curley Cannon. Polystyrene, cardboard, papier-mâché clay, tiles, linocut prints, digital fresco, paint, wood. 180 × 163 × 98cm. (Photo: Janet Curley Cannon)
The Grey Zone, 2012, Janet Curley Cannon. Found steel grid, aluminium wire and mesh, pigment inkjet prints on pvc, found wire, cement, wood, varnish. 80 × 28 × 8cm. (Photo: Janet Curley Cannon)
On New Dead End Street (detail), 2011, Janet Curley Cannon. Polystyrene, cardboard, papier-mâché clay, tiles, linocut prints, digital fresco, paint, wood. 180 × 163 × 98cm. (Photo: Janet Curley Cannon)
Sculpture allows me to reinvent the world. The artist in conversation with the author, 2013
Ricardo O’Nascimento creates poetic interactive artworks that comprise the engineering dynamics of electronics juxtaposed with the softness of textiles and feathers. His international profile focuses on performances that both embrace and question urban cultures and traditions. O’Nascimento’s work has political overtones that play with twentieth-century technologies and explore how they can transform perceptions of lifestyle issues. In his work there is a gentleness of delivery that evokes a mood of reflection – his message is both considered and conciliatory, rather than a strong polemic. The refined material palette and mode of execution ensure a penetrating gaze without confronting the viewer.
Creating soundscapes to evoke a sense of place is his passion:
I like to collect fragments of the sounds of a city, those pieces that stuck in my mind like a song that I could not avoid singing. Using a hat as a vehicle for my ideas, it is as if I am transferring my mind to the wearer and they are broadcasting those fragments.
Born in Brazil, but embracing a truly global practice, he is regularly appointed artist-in-residence in diverse locations to bring his gamut of new-media expertise to different audiences. In Taiwan his enthusiasm for being in one of the world’s hubs for electronic production combined with his interest in Taiwanese Aboriginal culture inspired two works. Pinyin (means ‘spelled sound’ in Chinese) was a performance piece celebrating the differences within Aboriginal communities through the creation of a costume that concealed seven touch sensors and four speakers. A dancer wore the interactive dress and in an orchestrated sequence touched the sensors to play a mesmerizing soundscape. In Mind Taipei sixty-nine speakers were embedded in a hat, along with a hidden MP3 player and a nine-volt battery. The ‘hat’ played a sonic landscape of Taipei. O’Nascimento recalls of the piece:
Listening to foreign tongues gives you the opportunity to guess what is being said – to invent a meaning. I created stories based only on what I thought the people were talking about. Mind Taipei was built like that with collecting sounds, not by the meanings, but instead by the feelings they trigger.
O’Nascimento enjoys designing projects where collaboration with other artisans is an integral element. This approach provides freshness to his practice and enables him to stretch both his own technological skills and conceptual horizons. His investigation into the body’s relationship with its environs has led to collaborations with fashion and textile designers, to enable the wearing of discreet electronic devices. A strata of new-media artists and designers collectively purport their approach as electronic couture. This informal collective is revolutionizing the way the body-politic references the social, emotional and cultural layering of societies. In Paparazzi Lover, O’Nascimento collaborated with Dutch fashion designer Anbasja Blanken during his residency in the Museums Quartier in Vienna. Together they created a dress that lit up when being photographed – through sixty-two hidden lightemitting diodes that reacted to the flashes from the cameras. Paparazzi Lover acknowledged and commented on the cult of celebrity and how the love/hate relationship between the photographed and the photographer is often under tension.
Developing experiences that metamorphose the static object into something that appears more alive and thereby closer to the human is his aim and preoccupation.
When I am working on an object or sculpture I design the experience people can have with it and how they perceive the environment through that object. What is important to me is less the formal sculpture, but more the feeling and experience that can be raised from the relationship among people, the crafted object and surrounding environment.
Extract from artist’s statement, 2013.
Paparazzi Lover, 2012, Ricardo O’Nascimento. Textiles, plastics electronics. 130 × 70cm. (Photo: Florian Wiesser)
With Rambler, O’Nascimento worked with Portugal’s ‘techsavy’ artist Tiago Martins to make a mobile and physical embodiment of the practice of micro-blogging. Through harnessing the capability of registering every step the walker takes in his specialized electronically ‘pimped’ trainers, a signal is sent to his Twitter account. The statement of monitoring the mindless, repetitive action on the social platform is to highlight the trend for endless, meaningless trivia posted on these types of websites. The performance of Rambler appears simple in execution, as the special trainers do not show the mechanics inside hence the performer looks like a normal person – reinforcing the commonality of the message.
O’Nascimento states:
Rambler is a critical embodiment of the (until now) metaphorical notion of blogging every step you take. It aimed to bring the practice of micro-blogging to one of many possible extremes, turning it into an automatic, thoughtless act of diffusing large amounts of slightly ambiguous, repetitive and arguably useless personal information. Manifesting itself physically as a pair of sneakers, it mirrors the trendy, easy going philosophy of the most popular micro-blogging platform of the moment: Twitter.
Feather Tales II became the vehicle for development of the concept with which O’Nascimento had been fascinated for some time – that of materializing the invisible dialogue between electromagnetic waves and their physical surroundings. Collaborating with Turkish artist Ebru Kurbak, he created a field of feathers that quivered on receiving the electromagnetic waves emitted from personal devices held by the viewers. The installation comprised 200 reactive units concealed in 1,000 white ostrich feathers. This physical manifestation of a hidden discourse illustrates perfectly O’Nascimento’s skill at delivering gentle commentary on twenty-first century culture.
Mind Taipei, 2010, Ricardo O’Nascimento. Hat, speakers, MP3 player. 25 × 25 × 20cm. (Photo: Ricardo O’Nascimento)
Sculpture is my attempt to understand and accept the polarities in life.
The artist in conversation with the author, 2012.
YaYa Chou is a Taiwanese-born artist living in the USA. She believes this has given her a fresh perspective on the American way of life, so she harnesses this outlook to underpin her work. Originally an independent animation filmmaker, she gradually evolved her practice to encompass a rich palette of media. Inspired by the idiosyncrasies of American culture, her concepts combine social comment with often frivolous and incongruous materials. She has a passion for transforming the mundane into extravagant sculptural statements about society’s alienation from the natural world, and the disparity between wealth and social phenomena. The sensory experience is important to her work: she wants participation.
Supported by science, eastern philosophy and literature, I investigate how lives are lived. The focus is expressing that which is subtle and invisible, creating sensory experiences and encouraging viewers to participate in it.
Extract from artist’s statement, 2012.
Chou is renowned for her creation of a series of sculptures using Gummy Bear sweets as the main constituent. For Chou, the cheap animal-shaped sweets symbolize the artificiality of our relationship with nature coupled with a statement about the reality of creating a nation of obese children. Harnessing the sweets, whose ingredients include tartrazine (a notorious additive that has detrimental health effects), she painstakingly built jewel-like sculptures that paradoxically exude a sickly sweet, repugnant odour. The parody for Chou: the low-paid are the primary consumers of this confectionary: the sculptures are in forms associated with the affluent, a chandelier and a fur rug.
The Gummy Bear series was developed with the collaboration of a glass artist to create the installation Color Based. Chou’s further research into artificial food colourings and flavours, used in children’s snacks, guided the installation for a series of clear glass infant-shaped vessels unexpectedly filled with Pepto Bismol. The medicine’s trademark lurid pink colour represented the contradictory message of negative nurturing. The manufacturing conveyor belt is mimicked as each ‘glass child’ stands in line, waiting to be filled in the circus tent. For Chou the circus symbolizes the over-excited behaviour that many children display after eating sweets.
The metaphorical animal motif Chou expanded in Beluga’s Journey, where a shoal of whales is suspended from trees – the artist’s comment on the very unnatural incarceration of wild animals. Created to make a powerful visual statement, the work has a whimsical quality in its form and materiality, designed to engender accessibility in its message.
Chandelier, 2010, YaYa Chou. Gummy Bears, beads, monofilament, CF bulbs, metal and mixed media. 114 × 53 × 53cm. (Photo: YaYa Chou)
A sculpture is whatever you decide to call a sculpture.
The artist in conversation with the author, 2013.
Jacob Dahlgren eloquently orchestrates the elements of colour, time and structure to create what could be termed ‘kinetic paintings’. His passion for colour and pattern is prevalent in these three-dimensional ‘action paintings’, as he refers to them, allowing the work to cross the boundaries of disciplines. Dahlgren, a Swedish artist whose background was in painting, steered away from the canvas when the medium became too limiting – he wanted the playfulness and physicality of involving large groups of people in his very public displays and demonstrations to dominate.
The journey from canvas to sculpture partly evolved with Colour Reading and Contexture, in which thousands of everyday rectangular objects were collated and stacked to form a coloured-coded city. The rainbow of vitality that exudes from this monumental installation is transformative – its power invites you to reassess each pillar’s components. Each facet is monochromatic and could be an item as simple as a dishcloth, a piece of bread, a carpet or a brick – individually insignificant, but when massed to epic proportions they metamorphose into something stunning. The collecting of the contents was a major feat in itself, involving many people from diverse industries – the gallery in Malmö Konsthall acted as the repository.
Colour Reading and Contexture, 2005, Jacob Dahlgren. Malmö Konsthall. Mixed media. 900 × 900cm. (Photo: Vegar Moen)
When art creeps into our daily lives and become object, Jacob Dahlgren resolutely tosses the object back into art’s domain and redirects our gaze.
Fredrik Liew, catalogue Blå Himmel Förlag, 2008.
A key work for Dahlgren was I, The World, Things, Life, which he originally built in 2004, but has reproduced many times all over the world because of its popularity. Its appeal on one level is that it breaks down barriers between the artist and the viewer as it involves genuine participation in the creation of the piece. I, The World, Things, Life consists of a wall completely covered with dartboards that have a hypnotic effect – enticing visitors to throw a dart and leave their aimed contribution. The optical interplay of the geometric yellow and black rings on the dartboards and the darts is brokered with delight from the enthusiastic participants.
In Heaven is a Place on Earth, another work with a global profile, Dahlgren employs multiple bathroom scales to cover a floor. The scales, purchased as a low-cost ready-made, form a strikingly bold minimalist statement. Viewers have to stand on the piece to contribute. Here the sculptor is referencing the issue of the weight we all carry and its impact on the planet. The installation also delivers social commentary as it has a marked negative effect on some individuals, many of whom feel uncomfortable about weighing themselves in public.
Heaven is a place on earth, 2006, Jacob Dahlgren. Installation Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm. Weighing scales. 900 × 1300cm. (Photo: courtesy of Bonniers Konsthall)
Garnering support for his interactive artworks is something Dahlgren excels at. His later works are documented on video, such as Demonstrations, a series of what could be deemed performances, but Dahlgren strongly resists this categorization. In Demonstration, the public reproduce a selection of modernist paintings by leading Swedish artist Olle Baertling in workshops led by Dahlgren. The rudimentary reproductions are then turned into placards, held aloft and marched around the roads in a properly organized and marshalled ‘demonstration’. The event is without political intent but proffers a humorous nod to national identity and pride.
Dahlgren has a personal aesthetic language of the stripe and the hoop, revealing a joy of the potency of the line that manifests itself in dynamic colour combinations that jar and dazzle. His commitment to the geometric motif is expounded in his serial performance of wearing a unique striped tee shirt everyday of his life. He comments on his website:
This is ongoing project in which I see myself as a geometrical painting moving about the world. I invite people from various backgrounds and areas of interest to curate shows from my collection of over 1,000 [tee shirts] and I wear these each day for the duration of the exhibitions. Each day I take a photograph of myself wearing the shirts, these pictures together with accompanying abstracted images of the prints from each of the selected shirts, the exhibition’s title and accompanying text, are formatted into documentary posters that act as archives for each curatorial project.
Demonstration, 2011, Jacob Dahlgren. Frankfurt, Germany. (Photo: Cem Yücetas)