Dancing with Scissors & Dancing with Scissors II
(Unlikely but Not Impossible) 2024
10th Street Studios
West Virginia USA 2024
As previously indicated, I consciously cultivate a mode of play within my daily working practice. This disposition is neither incidental nor recreational; rather, it functions as a methodological strategy that encourages sustained experimentation and speculative thinking. By maintaining this openness, I am led to investigate the sculptural potential of materials and objects that might otherwise be dismissed as unsuitable, utilitarian, or conceptually inert. The unlikely becomes a productive site of inquiry, and the ordinary is repositioned as a locus of formal and conceptual possibility.
(Unlikely but Not Impossible) 2024
10th Street Studios
West Virginia USA 2024
As previously indicated, I consciously cultivate a mode of play within my daily working practice. This disposition is neither incidental nor recreational; rather, it functions as a methodological strategy that encourages sustained experimentation and speculative thinking. By maintaining this openness, I am led to investigate the sculptural potential of materials and objects that might otherwise be dismissed as unsuitable, utilitarian, or conceptually inert. The unlikely becomes a productive site of inquiry, and the ordinary is repositioned as a locus of formal and conceptual possibility.
During the aforementioned conversation my colleague expressed intrigue at the conceptual premise yet struggled to envisage how certain items, scissors, for example, could operate sculpturally beyond their prescribed utility. This moment of scepticism proved generative. It exposed the extent to which functional identity constrains our perception of material possibility. The difficulty lay not in the object itself, but in the persistence of its association with use-value. Why should scissors be understood exclusively as cutting devices? What formal, structural, or symbolic capacities might emerge if they were disengaged from this singular purpose?
The conversation prompted a more focused interrogation of the boundaries between tool and material, function and form. It encouraged me to examine how deeply embedded assumptions shape our engagement with objects, and how artistic practice might unsettle those assumptions. The resulting series of sculptures, titled Unlikely, but Not Impossible, represents the culmination of this line of inquiry. In these works, tools are displaced from their conventional roles and reconstituted as sculptural components. Their familiarity is retained, yet their function is suspended, allowing alternative readings to surface.
Through this process, the works seek to challenge the hierarchy that privileges purpose over presence. By foregrounding the latent formal qualities of everyday implements, the sculptures propose that material potential is not inherent but contingent upon perception and context. The unlikely transformation of tool into sculpture is therefore not a denial of function, but a reconfiguration of it, an insistence that what appears improbable within established frameworks remains, nevertheless, possible.
Further reading on this can be found here...
The conversation prompted a more focused interrogation of the boundaries between tool and material, function and form. It encouraged me to examine how deeply embedded assumptions shape our engagement with objects, and how artistic practice might unsettle those assumptions. The resulting series of sculptures, titled Unlikely, but Not Impossible, represents the culmination of this line of inquiry. In these works, tools are displaced from their conventional roles and reconstituted as sculptural components. Their familiarity is retained, yet their function is suspended, allowing alternative readings to surface.
Through this process, the works seek to challenge the hierarchy that privileges purpose over presence. By foregrounding the latent formal qualities of everyday implements, the sculptures propose that material potential is not inherent but contingent upon perception and context. The unlikely transformation of tool into sculpture is therefore not a denial of function, but a reconfiguration of it, an insistence that what appears improbable within established frameworks remains, nevertheless, possible.
Further reading on this can be found here...