Writing about my practice after tutorial and crit

I feel like the original inspiration came from noticing the vivid colours of industrial materials, of course part of the attraction to these was their availability as being the waste of construction and so free to obtain or maybe even collect. The collecting process is however for me a means of research rather than a fetishisation of the object, although I feel very strongly about the objects, I am not interested in maintaining their context in relation to the situation they originate from although that might be a talking point that arises, instead I am interested in finding out about the material, how it can be altered and most importantly combined with others. Using found materials as the starting point in an investigation into the fabrication of my own materials is interesting to me, it has to be a very instinctive almost sensual experience of identifying with certain colours and textures, the way that a material can bend or how a material can be made to resist or succumb to gravity. So this relates to Phyllida Barlows work quite clearly but she was not the original inspiration since I had been working in this way for over a year before knowing anything about her, I was more inspired to work in this way by the materials themselves, I was interested in using expanding foam in conection to the artist Sterling Ruby, and perhaps it was his piece in a show at the Saatchi gallery a couple of years ago that originally inspired this approach to the use of materials. The absurdity of the sculpture was down to its construction from unknown materials, it is important that the origin of the material is uncertain in my current work. Talking to Karin Ruggaber about my work it became clear that the alchemy behind the plastic was important, the invisibility of its creation, mixing two chemicals is a much more unknowable process than the commonly established production of materials like wood and metal, we see trees growing and know that metal comes from the earth. This distinction between the recognisable process and the unrecognisable process is very important for me and I will be exploring this in some films soon hopefully. But it also connects to the way that sculptures are constructed, I have made it very apparent how the sculptures are held together and holding themselves up, the mystery is evoked by the varieties of the same type of plastic how it can be seen as part of a whole but jarring against each other, like the parts of different animals put in comparison, the leg of a chicken next to the leg of a cat, this also relates to my preoccupation with ideas of evolution. The evolution of material, the evolution of art, and the evolution of society. I'm interested in plastic in terms of its seeming newness in comparison to other materials, it represents the manmade more completely than any other common material and is perhaps the most common material in contemporary life. But then the expanding foam has a very organic appearance and it is this contradiction or apparent polarisation of plastic and nature that interests me and maybe connects my sculptural work with my computer generated work, thinking about plastic as the man made material in sculpture and CGI as the man made material in film, CGI seems very similar to plastic. They are also linked in production techniques which is something I would like to explore, with technologies like 3D printing. But also thinking about whether it is necessarily to actually make a form if it can exist satisfactorily in the computer model. Thinking about the use of CGI I relate to the work of Cory Arcangel as one of the most successful contemporary artists working with computer graphics, but having attended his talk at the Lisson gallery it is clear that his work is very purely conceptual in a way that my work isn't at all and so he becomes more of a counter point to my work than an inspiration. But this realisation has really helped me define a difference between a conceptual experience of art and a material experience of art, I described this to my friend as thinking about an object in terms of what you could do with it - the possibilities of the material, and what it could represent - the possibilities of the object as a sign. So for me conceptual work relies on signification to ideas that are not present in the work itself whereas material work contains its meaning within itself and is more focused with an aesthetic or haptic satisfaction or disruption. This could bring me into some discussions that were raised in andrew cheshire's lecture on the shape of behaviour. For example the question of what comes first the physical shape or the contextual meaning? I have tried to make work where the physical shape is the primary concern, but if meaning is simply what something is made out of then the work intentionally arouses a curiosity in the meaning of the material, what is this material, if that question is the primary concern then having shapes would maybe cloud this because it raises the question what does this shape represent or mean does it for example mean 'the human body on all fours without a head' perhaps my work does mean that on one level but it also means, whether more or less importantly 'expanding foam supporting pipe lagging with pink wire to make it stand up in a form that is not easily knocked over' that is the litteral meaning of the sculpture, it is something that is so unburdened with associations that the detail of the material becomes important and enjoyable, the way that it flexes over in an arch, the tautness of the string and the oozing gooeyness of the foam. But then the work also has a context other than its meaning as an apple is an apple it has the meaning of an apple comes from an apple tree and is eaten whole with the skin on or in a pie with pastry, each material I am using has a context of its own so I suppose the selection of the material is conscious of this and consciously isn't the material that has a context tied to art such as marble or bronze. The context relates the materials to construction work done by craftsmen who are thought of as unskilled in comparison to the architects who design the buildings. This can be related to the rise of outsourcing in art production, the artists that is often associated with this are minimalists particularly donald Judd who commissioned his work to be made by other people in order to remove the artists gesture from the work. I am in a way subverting or critiquing this outsourcing of art production by putting it in reverse, instead of asking craftsmen to use art materials I am making art using the materials of craftsmen. But then perhaps this is an incidental critique it is not one that I actually feel very strongly about and infect I think I relate quite closely with a lot of Judd's ideas about sculpture. I want to get to a stage where I am using plastic as an art material separately from the context of industrial production, I want the context of the plastic to be purely my engagement with it.