Gaston Bachelard in “The Poetics of Space” writes of “the interior immensity and spatial dizziness that can result even from small spaces that lend themselves to sudden accessibility.”

I consider myself to be operating within the European Modernist tradition of Constructed Art, although I have been stimulated over the last ten years or so by the non-relational artworks of American Minimalism.

A continuing concern sculpturally has been the development of volume interpenetrated by space, exemplified by dense ceramic works in the nineties, followed by less complex works, mostly wall hung, made from other materials. These later works display a formal language based upon simple geometry which emanates originally from the built environment, most significantly from the squint, a sloping sided device used for viewing through thick walls in medieval churches. A modified form of this structure, which has the ability to concentrate one’s gaze and draw it inwards to a more distant point, appears in almost all of the recent works which take the form of wall hung reliefs. Repetition and shifts in perspective increase the complexity of the space which develops between the moving viewer and the static vertical plane on which the reliefs are hung. Earlier works in this series had coloured flat areas behind the slots which are formed by mutely reflective stainless steel matrixes. Others had sheets of light. The purposes of both colour and light were to render this back plane indistinct and spatially ambiguous. The edges of the steel structure become drawn more distinctly by their proximity to the coloured or lit ground. Other works have been constructed in plywood but with the same intentions.

The most recent works have taken the back plane of these wall sculptures, pierced them to render them penetrable visually whilst maintaining a physical barrier to one’s viewing. The colour remains to augment the mood of a work, and the sculptures are beginning to move away from the wall, allowing the viewer to once again experience them more three dimensionally. These works are about how we see the material world, and are deliberately made to control how they are seen and understood.

All the works are carefully planned and measured in detailed working drawings. Parts are often cut by laser or router. While I am not interested in mathematics as a discipline, these sculptures sometimes deal with the Golden Section and are concerned specifically with proportion and balance. But in the end, I do not rely solely on measurement, there always remains an element of intuition.

January 2011