Leo Stein in the A-B-C of Aesthetics said that ‘Things are what we encounter, ideas are what we project’. Jacques Rancier talks of a work’s ‘material’ being the Sensorium. And Joshua Simon in a recent publication titled Neo-Materialism says this:
‘If we apply classical mechanics as a metaphor here, we can say materiality would be the minerals that make the stone-its texture, colour, and so on. But materialism is the force of gravity, the force that makes the stone, determining its relations with other things. After our experience with dematerialisation, we can regard materialism as being also the gravity within the stone. This scheme alters the stone itself.’
These are other some people’s ideas that run parallel with what we’re currently developing at Trykkeriet. What we’re making is a series of prints that are considered as objects, and are presented collectively as a sculptural installation whose form might recall the flatbed printing machine itself, or a series of upright domino’s about to fall or begin… We begin with found and made images, and gradually move away from these. But before that, we made photographs of architectural facades while walking through London’s financial district. So we begin with 2D things, and move towards 3D things, and vice versa. Most of the images and objects that we are working with do not have a stable or settled state, that’s to say that they are caught up in an ongoing process of reinterpretation through techniques and materials. Things repeatedly turning into, and out-of each other, and one-another. The final form is given just as much focus as the ‘turning into and out-of’, the live-ness of something emerging. While its tempting to think that the work makes itself, happily and self-sufficiently reproducing, of course its actually the outcome of intense and sustained, and highly skilled labour. Recording, exposing, inking, pulling, repeating… Currently definitions of what Material could be are expanding to include what might have previously been thought of as immaterial or non-material. This work is an active exploration of what might constitute ‘material’ after the explosion of artifice and fakes many years ago, and the proliferation of virtual ‘material’.
