Reading Week Research

Tony Cragg

Tony Cragg is a British sculptor known for his use of unconventional materials. The pieces he creates are supposedly meant to be frozen moments of movement that create very abstract shapes and forms. His work is all about the material and how it is being used, Cragg has used a selection of materials over his time including plastic, fibreglass, Kevlar and bronze. In order to create these amazingly unique forms he has to first embrace new technologies to help him realise his ideas. Most of his ideas are impossible to envision and even comprehend so making them by hand alone are almost impossible, he is usually aided by a machine to help bring his ideas to life. 

Richard Serra

Richard Serra has long been acclaimed for his challenging and innovative work. As an emerging artist in the early 1960s, Serra helped change the nature of artistic production. Along with the Minimalist artists of his generation, he turned to unconventional, industrial materials and accentuated the physical properties of his work. Freed from the traditional pedestal or base and introduced into the real space of the viewer, sculpture took on a new relationship to the spectator, whose experience of an object became crucial to its meaning. Viewers were encouraged to move around—and sometimes on, in, and through—the work and encounter it from multiple perspectives. Over the years Serra has expanded his spatial and temporal approach to sculpture and has focused primarily on large-scale, site-specific works that create dialogue with a particular architectural, urban, or landscape setting

The Matter of Time enables the spectator to perceive the evolution of the artist’s sculpted forms, from his relatively simple double ellipse to the more complex spiral. The final two works in this evolution are built from sections of toruses and spheres to create environments with differing effects on the viewer’s movement and perception. Shifting in unexpected ways as viewers walk in and around them, these sculptures create a dizzying, unforgettable sensation of space in motion. The entirety of the room is part of the sculptural field: As with his other sculptures, Serra purposefully organises the works to move the viewer through them and their surrounding space. The layout of works in the gallery creates passages of space that are distinctly different—narrow and wide, compressed and elongated, modest and towering—and always unanticipated. There is also the progression of time. There is the chronological time it takes to walk through and view The Matter of Time, between the beginning and end of the visit. And there is the experiential time, the fragments of visual and physical memory that linger and recombine and replay.

Santiago Calatrava

The exhibit was entitled “Santiago Calatrava: Sculpture Into Architecture”, and as the name suggests was based on the concept of architectural forms deriving from sculpture itself. This relationship is an intriguing one. It seems like Santiago’s main aim is to explore the possibilities of space and construction, and although they might seem abstract and random the sculptures don’t necessarily break the boundaries of architecture.

This experimentation showcases the vivid imagination of such a designer. These forms might not translate in to the physical world, they’re more like sketches that he’s envisioned or dreamt up. As a man that tries to bring order and clarity in to everyday scenarios, it’s refreshing to see these small snippets of thought, capturing his mentality just for that short moment in time. Sculpture is a medium for experimentation, where formal and spatial tests can be performed without architectural limitation. This trial and error method is the perfect way of testing both material and form, how they work in harmony.

Fosters & Partners

Marseille’s Vieux Port is one of the grand Mediterranean ports, but over time the World Heritage-listed site has become inaccessible to pedestrians and has been cut off from the life of the city. The masterplan for its regeneration will reclaim the quaysides as a civic space, creating new informal venues for performances and events and removing traffic to create a safe, semi-pedestrianised public realm. Its transformation is one of a series of projects to be completed in time for the city’s inauguration as European Capital of Culture in 2013.

Enlarging the space for pedestrians, the technical installations and boat houses on the quays will be replaced with new platforms and clubhouses over the water. The landscape design, which was developed with Michel Desvigne, includes a new pale granite surface, which echoes the shade of the original limestone cobbles. Planting is kept to a minimum in favour of hard-wearing, roughly textured materials appropriate to the port setting. The design eliminates kerbs and changes in level to improve accessibility, as well as using removable cast iron bollards to maximise flexibility.

   

Using very simple means, the space will be enhanced with small, discreet pavilions for events, markets and special occasions. At Quai des Belges, the prominent eastern edge of the harbour, a dramatic blade of reflective stainless steel will shelter a flexible new events pavilion. Open on all sides, its 46 by 22 metre canopy is supported by slender pillars – the canopy’s polished, mirrored surface reflects the surrounding port and tapers towards the edges, minimising its profile and reducing the structure’s visual impact.

   

Richard Deacon

Richard Deacon’s voluptuous abstract forms have placed him at the forefront of British sculpture since the 1980s and, hugely influential, his works are visible in major public commissions around the world. His voracious appetite for material has seen him move between laminated wood, stainless steel, corrugated iron, polycarbonate, marble, clay, vinyl, foam and leather, as if each sculpture were defined by contrast to its successor. As he explained in an interview in 2005, “Changing materials from one work to the next is a way of beginning again each time (and thus of finishing what had gone before)”.

Deacon describes himself as a ‘fabricator’, emphasising the construction behind the finished object – although many of the works are indeed  cast, modelled or carved by hand – and accordingly the logic of the fabrication is often exposed: sinuous curved forms might be bound by glue oozing between layers of wood or have screws and rivets protruding from sheets of steel, wearing their hearts on their sleeves. Such transparency highlights the reactive nature of the process: it is part of a two-way conversation between artist and material that transforms the workaday into something metaphorical. The idea of ‘fabrication’ also denotes making something up, of fiction rather than truth.