Self Portrait

About

During my time I have studied latin and ancient greek, furniture design and sculpture.  Much of my work draws upon ancient mythology - Perseus, the minotaur, the representation of Zeus as bull.  Interwoven with this is a fascination with physical relationships and their resulting negative spaces.  My work in furniture was instrumental in this and I began to fall hopelessly in love with movements like De Stijl and pretty much everything at the Bauhaus.

Each piece of creativity allows me to explore and define a little bit more.  Having worked in wood for quite a while the versatility of metal totally flipped my mind.  The simple act of making a load bearing right angle (a right angle has godlike status in my home) in metal suddenly threw open a host of avenues.  Wood could not keep up with my appetite for scaling the form back.  Metal became my future. 

I really came to sculpture through finding objects and composing them.  Which was quite difficult with a manual drill and a bizarre assortment of screwdrivers.  But the thrill was there and where there was no money to buy equipment a certain home grown ingenuity set in.  Drilling through anything metal was pretty much impossible and so I worked around it.  Or with it, perhaps.  I became fairly proficient in binding and counter balancing.  I was a great proponent of zip ties and metal washers lying around were like nuggets of gold.  Under the umbrella of conservation I began to see my work as recycling, giving a new life to something.

There is a character to be found in scrap.  One which is slightly more hidden when it comes to new material.  In my more recent work I have concentrated on using fresh metal in that it allows more exploration of a given idea, that it is not tethered by the suggestions of reclaimed matter.

I'm still bound by a mythology and a running exploration of the right angle.  Two of the three loves of my life.

Thanks for making it to the end.  Celebrate, and put the kettle on.

Tristram Thirkell