CONTEXT OF RESEARCH AND PRACTICE

Sculpture no longer operates on a formal or figurative level, liberalist attitudes have rendered purely aesthetic readings of a work difficult, and the complex structures of a relational era of making and viewing, in which both positions are collapsed, mean the object is in a constant state of transition.

The viewer is now subsumed into a process outside of day-to-day cognition, of experience, and is engaged on an abstracted level of ideals and social context. Despite this context, the artist still needs to consider formal material aspects of an object within these broader definitions. It therefore becomes a question of the process; of selection; of context; of practice; of reference; of placement, through which the work will finally be evaluated. It is my intention through this and other research to reveal this relational context in a world that is still materially evident. This is the phenomenology of perception through familiarity, expectation, time and material, perhaps.

My previous works such as Peckham Pothole illustrate these ideas clearly. The piece in question took a journey through material process, classification, social and civic response, geography, topology and time. By simply selecting a pothole in Peckham, and writing a letter of complaint to the local council it is rendered visible on a new level and in a new context. Further to this a material cast is then taken and remade in solid, absolutely transparent acrylic. The massive piece is then polished and displayed on a plinth within a museum context. It is revealed and is revealing. Other works such as In Dublin, a one tonne sphere of bitumen that slipped from first floor in to the bar of a disused Dublin bar perform a similar spectacle, but of deconstruction. A series of solid acrylic spheres that reflect and distort their surrounding, wherever they are sited, also follow such an approach.