Spirituality Levels: Kinetic Sculpture
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Manchester UK 2009
This shift might be understood through a loosely Gothic lens. If the earlier works suggested a kind of archaeological retrieval, the later works adopt a more overtly “Frankensteinian” logic, drawing upon the idea of composite assembly from disparate sources. Crucially, these components were no longer exclusively drawn from the metaphorical “dead” of studio detritus, but from the realm of the mass-produced and readily available, objects still circulating within systems of use and exchange. Discount retail environments, particularly pound stores, became a primary source of such materials, offering a continuous supply of inexpensive and interchangeable parts.
Underlying this development is a longstanding interest in the proliferation of scientific innovation during the nineteenth century and the Gothic literary imaginaries that both paralleled and responded to it. The experimental ethos associated with figures such as Dmitri Mendeleev, Louis Pasteur, and Marie Curie finds a resonance here, as do the speculative and quasi-animate worlds articulated by writers including Bram Stoker, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Mary Shelley. These dual influences, empirical inquiry and imaginative projection, inform the hybrid character of the resulting works.
Within this context, the pound store emerges as a contemporary analogue to the cabinet of curiosities: a site of unexpected juxtapositions and latent possibilities. Objects such as inexpensive battery-operated clocks, laser spirit levels, wire coat hangers, and ballpoint pens are encountered not simply as discrete items, but as components within a broader field of potential relationships. Of particular significance was the laser spirit level, both for its functional properties and for the broader implications of its accessibility. That a technology once associated with advanced scientific research and speculative fiction could be so cheaply manufactured and widely distributed is itself indicative of shifting technological and economic conditions.
Start Running Exhibition
Sandbar
Manchester UK 2009
This shift might be understood through a loosely Gothic lens. If the earlier works suggested a kind of archaeological retrieval, the later works adopt a more overtly “Frankensteinian” logic, drawing upon the idea of composite assembly from disparate sources. Crucially, these components were no longer exclusively drawn from the metaphorical “dead” of studio detritus, but from the realm of the mass-produced and readily available, objects still circulating within systems of use and exchange. Discount retail environments, particularly pound stores, became a primary source of such materials, offering a continuous supply of inexpensive and interchangeable parts.
Underlying this development is a longstanding interest in the proliferation of scientific innovation during the nineteenth century and the Gothic literary imaginaries that both paralleled and responded to it. The experimental ethos associated with figures such as Dmitri Mendeleev, Louis Pasteur, and Marie Curie finds a resonance here, as do the speculative and quasi-animate worlds articulated by writers including Bram Stoker, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Mary Shelley. These dual influences, empirical inquiry and imaginative projection, inform the hybrid character of the resulting works.
Within this context, the pound store emerges as a contemporary analogue to the cabinet of curiosities: a site of unexpected juxtapositions and latent possibilities. Objects such as inexpensive battery-operated clocks, laser spirit levels, wire coat hangers, and ballpoint pens are encountered not simply as discrete items, but as components within a broader field of potential relationships. Of particular significance was the laser spirit level, both for its functional properties and for the broader implications of its accessibility. That a technology once associated with advanced scientific research and speculative fiction could be so cheaply manufactured and widely distributed is itself indicative of shifting technological and economic conditions.
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Experimentation with this device led to a key formal development. Passing the laser beam through the transparent barrel of a disposable ballpoint pen produced a refracted and shifting field of light, modulated by imperfections in both the plastic surface and the environment onto which it was projected. This interaction between precision technology and material irregularity proved generative. By integrating a clock mechanism to produce controlled movement, and employing wire as both structural support and armature, these elements were combined into a kinetic system. The resulting instrument, when mounted on a wall, projects a continuously shifting curtain of refracted laser light across the surface above it. The work thus operates simultaneously as object and event: it is both materially present and immaterially extended through its projection.
In this way, the sculpture negotiates a series of productive tensions, between the handmade and the mass-produced, the static and the kinetic, the object and its effect. Its hybrid constitution reflects not only a method of construction, but a broader engagement with processes of transformation, circulation, and perception. Ultimately, the work situates itself between scientific demonstration and poetic evocation, proposing a form in which technological residue and aesthetic inquiry converge to produce an experience that is at once precise, contingent, and continually unfolding.
In this way, the sculpture negotiates a series of productive tensions, between the handmade and the mass-produced, the static and the kinetic, the object and its effect. Its hybrid constitution reflects not only a method of construction, but a broader engagement with processes of transformation, circulation, and perception. Ultimately, the work situates itself between scientific demonstration and poetic evocation, proposing a form in which technological residue and aesthetic inquiry converge to produce an experience that is at once precise, contingent, and continually unfolding.