Contorted steel, fragments of demolished buildings, twisted fences and solidified molten aluminium are some of the varied materials I seek to highlight in my sculptural installations. I choose these discarded forms because they defy the structural strength they have been industrially manufactured to demonstrate and I see potential in the diversity and complexity of their material state. The potential to be other than, to reconfigure, to be free. This freedom is only visible when contrast against the habitual pattern, and routine automatism of daily life.1 They too are bodies, attempting to navigate a world that is simultaneously determinate and indeterminate, contracting and expanding, full of order and chaos. Made up as much from lingering memories of history as they are the present moment and a future they are yet to explore.
The nature of matter and materiality as it relates to human life is the central investigation of my practice. These concepts are reflected in the philosophy of New materialism, which challenges the limits of mechanistic understandings of matter as inert, passive and separate, and suggests the practical and ecological benefits of adopting a renewed view of matter, as a dynamic, self-transformative force, with agentic capabilities.
Although New materialism desires to let materials speak for themselves, the vitality of matter still tends to be ignored. I dislocate these fragments from their found site and shift them into an art context where they are then elevated using a range of display mechanisms. This enables them a platform on which they can perform. To transcend the quiet and understated, to be viewed more critically and revalued. This process involves labour and relies on my ability to shape matter, making a space for it to be. While at the same time I recognise matter itself has an inherent ability to shape and form.
I look to artists Alicja Kwade and Carol Bove who similarly employ everyday materials to examine space, owning their intervention and authorship of the work but also letting the found speak in order to alter perceptions and heighten the experiential potential of sculpture.
Scientist and feminist theorist Karen Barad proposes a theory called “agential realism”. She maintains “matter has agency and is interconnected with human knowers, shaped by them and shaping them … matter is a dynamic intra-active becoming that never sits still – an ongoing reconfiguring of the world”2. Displacing these discarded remnants allows me to interrogate structures of hierarchy used by society to value the self and the material world. My aim is to rethink the divide between the cultural and the natural, to recognise the relationship between humans and matter as a mutually performative interaction, one which is always responsible for co-creating what is.
Notes
- Elizabeth Grosz, Feminism, Materialism, and Freedom in Coole, Diana H., and Samantha Frost. 2010. New materialisms: ontology, agency, and politics. Durham [NC]: Duke University Press, p.148.
- Karen Barad in Rachel Tillman, Toward a New Materialism: Matter as Dynamic, p.32, accessed April 2, 2019, https://www.humansandnature.org/toward-a-new-materialism-matter-as-dynamic
Mel Arnold 