BETWEEN THE PHYSICAL AND THE UNPERCEIVABLE
After a visit to the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013 I experienced Marc Quinn’s gigantic inflatable sculpture of a disembodied women gazing with purple eyes over the water from the not so distant island overlooking St Mark’s Square. From the opposite shore I had not realised it was inflatable. It seemed to be carved in marble. Getting closer I discovered its absence of solidity in the air pumping fan fabric statue. I was seduced by it and I became interested in making an inflatable myself. Working with different materials and juxtaposing them constantly demonstrates how my work fluctuates in medium. I employ wavelengths of colour to create the unpredictable. ‘Invisible Column’ is a monumental flimsy sculpture. It is about intangibility and the romantic nature of the unseen in the immateriality of the material itself. Aware there is more to this work than what meets the eye I found myself in a very soft and flexible wobbly warp. The work is witty and complex, challanging the very definition of sculpture. There is nothing carved in stone nor wood, no casting metal nor plaster, unlike a Brancusi it opens up like a Pandora’s box. ‘Invisible Column’ takes you on a journey around the mathematical elongations of my restless young mind.
The work evolved in little steps. Seeing other artists’ work and going to exhibitions ideas eventually started to grow in my mind. Although I have realised it’s not only what I see that makes me think but also what I don’t see. There are incredible possibilities in the invisible. So when I imagine something that is not there already, I think to myself this must be new. And when I build an object with my hands I have progress in mind. When I decide I am going to put it in a gallery space I have a resolution. This object is not only showing the progress and the resolution of my practice but also the invisible side. Attached is my working spirit and the magic. Ritualistically like a magician I make the material disappear applying colour to it. The material vanishes. It ceases to exist. It becomes invisible. I make it reappear again through colour, it challenges the formal historical provenance of the material – the work is already something else, it has been modified, mutated, metamorphosed and sufficiently simplified.
Considering the craft of historical sculpture such as Michelangelo’s ‘David’, in this work that aspect is left intentionally aside. I feel that today‘s art is undergoing a dramatic practical change and my artistic pretence is to dismantle the process of invention working with it at the same time. A good example of a contemporary artist that shares this philosophy is Martin Creed. In his recent exhibition ‘What’s the point of it?’ at the Hayward Gallery London in 2014. Creed’s evaluation of the world resumes in simple creative moments. Like Creed, my work proliferates a sculptural chronotope exploring time and space, history and the future. I am constantly on the search, shape shifting and dream catching my ideas.
