CNC PROJECT Since the early 1990s, my work has involved the creation of conceptually based objects that use visual influences from tradition. My influences, aesthetically speaking come from Japanese/Islamic geometric patterns. However, conceptually I’m concerned with technology and how it is shaping the way we think and the environments we exist in. The Japanese word Zenrei, which loosely means, “Breaking the molds of the past” is a philosophy that is commonly avoided in Japan. Governments and Businesses are usually reluctant to try something that has not been done before. In
2003 after moving to Japan I began a series of work that used CNC (Computer
Navigated Cutting)
in its main production process. At the beginning of the project it was
necessary for me to form relationships with a variety of Japanese firms in
order to realize my ideas. At first this was very challenging as I was asking
companies, with no previous art involvement to help me make pieces of work,
behind which they saw no financial or practical reasoning. The
process of making the work starts with an old or ancient design/pattern, which
I then manipulate on a computer. I try to determine the scale of each piece by
thinking of it as a painting on a wall. The 3D design is then carved out using
a machine that is more commonly used for sculpting car prototype parts. I am
interested in how we qualify and put art into different genres and I try to
make work that is difficult to categorise yet can sit in many categories at
once. Article by Nick West (Tate Modern) The Las Vegas based art critic Dave Hickey once recounted returning from judging a competition in Washington DC. He drew a comparison between sitting in a darkened room with four slides flickering on a projected wall and that of the shuffled icons on the slot machines at the arrivals lounge. Which was more democratic? Vegas: at least everyone has the same chance of winning. Similarly, the internet’s capacity for democratising ideas offers comparable scope for interpretation. Here’s my interpretation of Sam Firth’s new work: If it were relevant
for me to continue with pop references I’d clumsily draw formal comparisons
with colourless rubrics’ cubes and shattered polo mints, but this work’s cool
Post Minimalism couldn’t be more detached from consumer culture. Like
Minimalism’s economy of means, emptied structures, pared-back and elemental
grid forms, the work here is not the work. The work is here the space, and the
object is the articulation of that space. But unlike its art historical
predecessor of measured, Zen-like geometry, the space here has altered. The altered space has
gradually modulated in a progressive sequence in his last three works. In CNC,
strict adherence to formalist Minimalism was followed. Had the play of light
not allowed for subtle reinvention, this work ran the risk of simply being
derivative. In CNC2 the forms translate into a hybrid; somewhere between
turbine and a flower, organic and industrial as if governed by acoustic
function or an unseen law. In this most recent piece, the space has altered yet
again but in a more exaggerated and dramatic way; expanding outward,
dissipating and crystallising in every direction at once, like a pixilated web
of fractural matter, a freeze frame of particle magma, a little like the
clunking cylinder of chance, a coincidence of atoms. |
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