CSM BA Fine Art 3D

@ameliakkirby

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Loosening the boundaries between form and function, my practice explores notions of tangibility in physical space, concerned with the effects of audience participation. Modelling objects that remain dormant until inserted in physical space, inevitably forming a temporal social context, attempting to leave the element of a trace. Testing the limits of materiality, in efforts to function conceptually by communicating language as a tangible object.

 

Something like braille, a system that communicates its meaning through touch, is affectively functionless in today’s climate if accessed sculpturally. Braille is incomprehensible without prior knowledge, which addresses wider issues of knowledge and accommodation, gesturing to the bias accessibility in the art world creating work specifically for those or aren't cater for or who rely on different senses to experience art. Nevertheless, the objects offering participation for all, whether you can or can't translate braille, the bumpy sensations as you glide your hand across are surprisingly addictive, like a light tickling. Creating a space that builds its own history, covered in the fingerprints of anonymous spectators, the residue from their skin now existing on a single surface, never settling, constantly moving as new participants form new layers on top. Never wiped away or removed, this sense of immaterial gestures piling up. Viewers “come to look at art and without knowing it, they are an integral part of the work they see”. [1]

 

[1] Berliner, M., 2009. The Role of the Viewer in the Gallery Space. Scripps Senior Theses. Paper 12., [online] pp.5,6. Available at: <https://scholarship.claremont.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1011&context=scripps_theses>.