Buckinghamshire New University

I went to see Thomas Heatherwick’s exhibition at the V & A because I wanted to continue my investigation into form and function and the boundaries between art and craft. I had recently read Tony Cragg’s essay on material. I expected that Heatherwick would have something interesting to say about materials. I thought I would also find out about how he uses ‘process’.

His functional designs are developed through the process of making. He takes simple geometric form and submits it to repetition and change of scale and pushes materials by cutting, folding or stacking. He looks at how material behaves under different conditions and produces what he calls ‘test pieces’. For example, in his Christmas card series, postage stamps are stuck together along their perforated edges to form a 3D object similar to a tree decoration. In another piece he tests very long zips, obtained on a roll, to make an un-zippable form which has been developed into an expanding handbag.

He talks about a ‘purposeful aimlessness’ in his approach to making. Through experimentation he gains more insight into the possibilities of the materials he is using. The creative process relies on choices being made at decision points. These decision points become apparent during testing rather than being set in a pre-determined design. An action or a single moment can then be the creative potential needed to produce the emerging forms.

Heatherwick is making functional architecture and other utilitarian constructions that involve craftsmanship. However, it his method of purposeful aimlessness that can be carried over into making sculpture.

I think our relationship to the world is tied to our relationship with objects. We are surrounded by things we make, modify and throw away in a continuous cycle. The form of these objects depends on their function, and function is always in a state of continuous evolution.

I have been reading Origins of Form by Christopher Williams to give insight into some of the natural and man-made forms that I have been drawing. He asks whether there can ever be a perfect form that matches function. He concludes that there never can be, hence the continuous reinvention that we see all around us both in nature and in industrial objects. Some forms are more successful because they have a greater economy of design and others hardly survive for any length of time at all.

A sculptor can make a perfect form because there is no function. The form cannot be criticised in terms of its efficacy, nor its craftsmanship. But the materials used have to be doing something that they were never intended to do and the object produced has to have crossed the line from a formless, meaningless mass into something that means art.

As a result of reading this really good book I now want to start thinking about species of forms and peaks of development with relation to sculpture.