The last days

After a coat or three of bronze resin, the piece really comes alive, the definition of the muscles greatly enhanced. Ready then for the bondage session, so that it has something to struggle against. I scaled the lengths of rope based on those used in Kinbaku.

Excavation

Carving took me about a week, punctuated by stripping off to act as my own model. It was those scorchio days at the end of April, so no hardship. Finding the right tools is half the battle, and a loose hacksaw blade was very useful. What's extraordinary is the freedom one has to change one's mind, even when the form is quite developed. One can always dig deeper, somehow another form is contained within the previous one, and it's that irreversibility that makes the process compelling.

Countdown

Adding muscles to the underlying form in a clay model provided me with the basis to scale up. I had two huge blocks of foam delivered to the studio (in case I screwed up the first one). Though at this point mistakes weren't really an option. I'm off to Pietrasanta on 29th to finish a couple of marble pieces, so I have to finish and deliver my Broomhill piece before that. In order to do it in the time available and within the budget provided, I'm using a material and technique I've never tried before. The upside of that is every action and decision become creative discovery. I've realised I have no interest in work that just becomes a fabrication exercise.

Allegory

The next day I went to the National Gallery to look at muscles. Big allegorical paintings like Veronese's are both complex and highly accessible. Classical themes, idioms and techniques are ripe for repurposing.

Murder

Thinking about the moral ambiguities of intervening in Libya, and more generally about how relativistic our morality is, how we constantly adjust our world view in order to feel good about ourselves, an image occurred to me of a body bound and dumped like a murder victim, an allegorical figure of conscience. I realised this could be my struggling form, hidden under a dirty tarpaulin. The first thing I did was make a quick mockup, to work out the scale. It needed to be big enough to be noticed if it was partially hidden, but small enough to be realistically worrying.Then I made a plaster model, marking a new iteration of the sine wave form that has fascinated me for the last two years. As I was wrapping it up in string, I was reminded of Japanese bondage photos I'd seen (by Araki, I think), and if you google Kinbaku you'll see what I mean. We are complicit in the structures that cause us and others pain and unhappiness. Is Capitalism a form of sado-masochism?

Disillusionment

What I've been discovering is that for the interaction to generate form, then the contents have to almost fill the cage. And in that case, the muscularity and sense of a tangle of limbs is lost. It becomes flabby.
Just to try and convince myself, I made the cage at full scale. I'm still interested in it, but not for this project. I think it needs to be full of rubbish.

Struggle

In parallel with modelling the cage, I was making wax models of muscular masses. Pictures of wrestling were a great help in finding arrangements of limbs that never resolve into an ordered body. I'm interested in providing those cues that allow the viewers brain to jump to its own conclusions, completing the work.

Constraint

In developing the idea, I felt I wanted to make the cage do more, having an internal profile or points that poked, so that form was generated by the interaction between cage and content. I pursued this through a series of models, during which the cage became increasingly skull shaped.

Captive

So this was the idea that I proposed to Broomhill; a struggling muscular form contained in a cage resembling a skull. In some sense we're all prisoners, serving life sentences in our bodies, looking to escape through alcohol and drugs or fantasies about life after death. But we depend on, and are formed by, constraints and limitations. We play the jailor as well as the prisoner, constructing the cage in which we feel safe or comfortable.

I jumped right in with my first post, and realise I should have introduced myself. I've been mad busy developing my piece, so I'll try and catch up with a series of posts. First of all, here's a picture of some recent work, shown at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Oxford last year. The red spiral (Chief) is now at the Beukenhof-Phoenix gallery in Belgium, as part of their Sculptour 2011 outdoor exhibition, in case anyone wants to visit. They are both part of what I'm calling my Incarnate series, as is the new piece for Broomhill. What interests me is the fact of being embodied. It seems to me that we understand and locate ourselves in the world primarily through a mapping or projection of our bodies, and that everything we see or do or think is mediated by the particular characteristics and construction of the human body. What I am doing in this series is using specific instances or aspects of that physicality to look at it's role in the creation of myth, propaganda, fetish, identity and so on, in a style that I would call Comic Existentialism. My main man at the moment is Samuel Beckett.

Containment

I've been working separately with small models of the cage element of my sculpture. Originally I thought the cage would just be an egg shape, but I want the contact between it and the form contained in it to reveal something latent. From another piece of work that's going on I've been thinking about skulls and the furious activity of thinking that they contain.