The Sacred Object – Question 1
How do you relate your work to contemporary sculpture?
Things have changed in an unprecedented way over the last hundred years. We have rapidly moved from an object based culture to a more conceptual approach. Since the 1960′s sculpture has moved into areas considering the environment in terms of space, time and qualities of location and experience. This paradigmal shift has caused the reconsideration of what sculpture is in profound ways. The artist now considers what he or she does as a outward moving process of engagement outside purely personal responses to the world. This latter approach is indeed a very short lived phenomenon that arose between the renaissance and nineteenth century romanticism. Art has now expanded into regions that were previously thought outside the prescribed canons. It has claimed territory in such a way that it has lost its core meaning and returned to the pre-renaissance status activating explorations of creativity that require new definitions of purpose, aesthetics and context. We are returning to the point where art is created and can be or not recognised as such, and it will be left for future generations to redefine their view much as we see archeological objects that were made without what we would now call artistic intent as artworks.
I envisage what I do as a lens on an idea. A point of focus of metaphorical significance. In a broad sense a sacred object. The earliest sculptures are almost invariably associated with some spiritual or religious practice usually representing an anthropomorphic or zoomorphic form. A sculpture mediates space and alter the way we perceive the world. It is this ability of sculpture to engage on a physical level that gives it such a powerful means to then raise questions about our wider relationship with the world.
The tribal craftsman fashioning his idol addresses the less visible areas of a work with as much importance as those clearly on show. Significance is given to areas beyond what you see, offering the work to an invisible destination, one not of this world. My work likewise functions as an intermediary transceiver for elements that cannot be seen, existing outside the mundane but nevertheless part of a reality.