Missing image

© copyright The Artists

SUNSET BENCH 1999

Iron Vein

Details

Dimension
80.5 X 123.5 X 42.8
Media
IRON AND WOOD
Accession number
P7169

Summary

Recent media attention has drawn people’s attention to the possibilities of using ‘junk’ creatively. People are inspired to make work from whatever they can find. Our working practice is a personal development influenced by Duchamp, Rauschenberg, Schwitters and Dubuffet. After searching through scrap yards when working on previous projects we have become aware of the innate qualities of the materials available which have been deemed worthless in their original working environments. We were fascinated by the creative potential of these new found materials ad the intrinsic beauty of the shape and texture which an industrial society overlooks. We combined elements as the objects’ nature suggested, transmuting their function, context and cultural value and incorporating sculptural and functional concerns. We aim to produce furniture and sculpture which not only complements and enhances the landscape into which it is placed but also provokes thought and contemplation, pleasing to the mind.

Traditional blacksmithing techniques such as hot metalworking have provided the scope to reuse and reform materials which would otherwise be redundant, enabling a new level of refinement and manipulation.

Reclaimed Recycling in contemporary British Crafts and Design, The British Council, London 1999

Glossary

  • Contemporary

    Existing or coming into being at the same period; of today or of the present. The term that designates art being made today.

  • Landscape

    Landscape is one of the principle genres of Western art. In early paintings the landscape was a backdrop for the composition, but in the late 17th Century the appreciation of nature for its own sake began with the French and Dutch painters (from whom the term derived). Their treatment of the landscape differed: the French tried to evoke the classical landscape of ancient Greece and Rome in a highly stylised and artificial manner; the Dutch tried to paint the surrounding fields, woods and plains in a more realistic way. As a genre, landscape grew increasing popular, and by the 19th Century had moved away from a classical rendition to a more realistic view of the natural world. Two of the greatest British landscape artists of that time were John Constable and JMW Turner, whose works can be seen in the Tate collection (www.tate.org.uk). There can be no doubt that the evolution of landscape painting played a decisive role in the development of Modernism, culminating in the work of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists . Since then its demise has often been predicted and with the rise of abstraction, landscape painting was thought to have degenerated into an amateur pursuit. However, landscape persisted in some form into high abstraction, and has been a recurrent a theme in most of the significant tendencies of the 20th Century. Now manifest in many media, landscape no longer addresses solely the depiction of topography, but encompasses issues of social, environmental and political concern.

  • Sculpture

    A three-dimensional work of art. Such works may be carved, modelled, constructed, or cast. Sculptures can also be described as assemblage, in the round, relief, and made in a huge variety of media. Contemporary practice also includes live elements, as in Gilbert & George 'Living Sculpture' as well as broadcast work, radio or sound sculpture.