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