Key Artists
These are the artists I return to again and again. They are a permanent influence on my practice, their ways of making and thinking are always informing my methodologies. I have been looking at these artists throughout the course of this MA, and this section summarises why.
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I share Olivia Bax’s intuitive process of welding steel to form the armature of her sculptures, an approach she views as ‘another form of drawing.’ These metal frameworks are both ‘an inner structure and an active component', which she then fleshes out with solid sections. Structured around herself, they feel human in scale and engagement. They are enactive of the bodily actions used to make them, manipulated with recognisable contact by their maker’s own hands. They also negotiate humanness in terms of movements like ‘sitting, reaching, leaning…holding, resting’ as well as pulling on human surroundings from the industrial to the domestic.
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I am interested in Bax’s ability to use the language of sculpture to articulate what human gestures feel like in 3d. I look to her for inspiration regarding the activeness of armatures, alluding to function, and the simultaneous ability to both support and restrict. Her works negotiate vessel-like forms; I am interested in how she deals with interior/exterior spaces and how colour becomes an embedded and embodied feature of her works.
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Olga Balema’s work is ‘sensitive [and] self-aware.’ She deals with material tensions, fragility and a selfhood that sits between a reciprocity of human/bodily connotations and a responsiveness to the site she shows it in. They summon up a physicality where her work’s goal is to be an ‘expression of itself, making their own forms, taking their own space. Relying on insular decadence of reticence, leaving people to the speaking, expressing themselves rather through action and influence.’
I am specifically interested in the works, Her Curves and On The Brink Of My Sexy Apocalypse. I am most inspired by the idea that her works are ‘not haunted by but hunting the human body’. This notion enlivens them with a poignant and physical edge to their enquiry, always reaching for the body, searching for it, as something to work with rather than from. I am attentive to (and still developing my own) balance between the lexical and corporeal that Balema uses.
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Nairy Baghramian has a poetic ability to ‘transfer the figurative act into abstraction’, translating the subtleties of human postures, poses and movements into the core of her sculptures. It is how her works hold human poses that are of relevance to me. This humanisation reveals a vulnerability in the way they support and hold one another, giving them the feel of certain dispositions. There is a reliance on prostheses, as slight and slender structures support bulky bodies that look precariously held. And they are completely honest about it.
Her works quietly yet relentlessly discuss instability, fragmented parts of the body and architecture. I am interested in how her works are considered ‘open and discursive’ and how this invites contradictory readings like being weightless and weighty, poised but dependent.
I am especially interested in how she navigates the arrangement of her installations ‘as though in a drawing in the space, the arrangement of the sculptures echoes the shape of the room and emphasizes its axes; at the same time, the composition strikes one as a circulatory system that would ordinarily be at work behind the scenes.’ This notion of revealing the sensitivities of a site, echoing it within the works, and giving it the feeling of being in a drawing is the aspiration of my practice.
I am interested in the sensitivities of Djordjadze’s practice. Her works are elegant, so paired down that only their essential structures remain – particularly in her use of steel. The installations are constellation-like with an acute sensitivity to architectonics. The sensibility of her works extends beyond the visual and into time and space, using their display to provoke shifting modes of experience.
I look at how Djordjadze navigates the various points at which the body enters her works. She deems the physicality of it, the gesture, to be essential. This gesture is related to the body – ‘the body that made what you see and the body that sees what you made’ . She says, ‘I am working with movements. I work with materiality or energy’, this is a personal experience to do with ‘how [she] moves and how [she] lives.’
She repeatedly uses the same materials – materials I am interested in, too, steel, foam, broad sheets of solid colour – and in doing so, they lose their functionality through this 're-shaping, [they] both lose and advance their initial referents’ moving ‘backward and
forward.’ In doing so, she builds her own language through these forms; sculptures that are vitrines, shelves, plinths, chairs, and none of these things. ‘The energy of one flows into the energy of another’ which builds up a series of material expressions that ‘approximate but never quite embody, and I am fascinated by their territory of approximation.
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Holly Hendry’s work is concerned with the inner workings of things, regularly referencing the human body. Her use of human anatomy is obvious but, at the same time, stretched out as the site of the body extends to machines. Her installations and sculptures are cartoon-like industrial beasts, chomping things up and spitting them out in a playful dialogue of excavation, digestion, and processing.
I like her direct replication of bodily references with imagery and with titles. I am interested in how she enables her sculptures to suggest movement, as if ‘twitching with life’ with looped and repetitive motions. I like her thoughts towards these movements as ‘thinking tools of sorts…align[ing] to some early animation techniques…relat[ing] to my constant grapple with image and object, flatness and fullness’, which are shared territories of mine. It is through Hendry’s influence that I found a way to help articulate my hard steel lines with softer materials; she explains seeing the metal as a kind of ‘skeleton’, ‘forming the rigid backbone…that the other materials undo’ and most of all I admire her ingenuity with plaster in soft pastel colours which she constructs, puzzle-like, into layered and stacked interconnected parts.
Other Influences
This is a list of artists who have been circulating on the periphery during this unit, clocking images and contexts that are going to shape and inform my research going forwards.
Notes from the margin, 2022
Mixed media installation with audio for Spike Island Open Studios, dimensions variable
Relevance: how they use ceramics as a way of thinking, the colour pink, how Macvoy combines text, sound and visuals to create an experience relating to the physicality of site/situation
Behind Mother's Eyes, 2022
Painted ceramic
No dimensions given
Relevance: how they depict a phycological representation of the human body, use of ceramics
The study of hairbands
No details given
Relevance: how they form archives of human presence and the movement left behind in material form
with, and, or, without
installation view at Camden Art Centre, 2015
Dimensions variable
Relevance: the possibilities of plaster, investigating how a material or body yields another
I'm Still Processing it, 2022
3D-printed and blown vessels presented on surgical trollies
Relevance: use of ceramics and glass, exploring how functional objects like these speak of human existence, how flesh holds experience
Empath, 2022
jesmonite, plaster, gesso
253 x 90 x 90 cm
Relevance: how she explores sculptural language - balance, weight, material presence
Prosper & Prosper, 2020
Steel, wood, soft polyurethane foam, silicone, talc, bronze and copper powder
51 x 106 x 35 cm
Relevance: soft vs hard forms, functionality, aesthetics of the body​
Along the line, 2018
recycled rubber mat, aluminium modular pipes, engobe ceramic, plaster, resin, steel, hair extensions, styrofoam, rubber coated aluminium chain, plastic, lock keys
Dimensions variable
Relevance: the relationship between the human-made and human trace, transitional states of materials