Statement
I produce sculptural and live work which is informed by material processes and working life, balancing contemporary concerns against care for formal and material qualities.
I favour a practice-as-research model, so I try to ensure that my method is public, accessible and open to critique, through regular talks, interviews and presentations. The artworks sit as outcomes of the wider practice, helping the making process to be demystified, social and socially-engaged.
My method starts in the personal, using the idea of autoethnography - acknowledging that I am bound up with the practice as part of its condition. From this examined position I begin by noticing and recording, through writing and drawing, the objects, stories, actions and events which move me. I then re-stage, re-perform and re-enact these relationships in the studio, slowing them down to identify and refine the material which has the potential to relate with an audience. This can be actions, sounds, found objects, made things … refusing to settle on any single reference. I am also influenced by the notion of the event score, and the scores’ potential to create live, chance-influenced artworks; the implicit and explicit rules of the gallery and of performance.
Recently it has been the direct relationship between made things (constructed from polystyrene, cements, plasters, paints and steel components) and my own body which has been the basis for my work. The practice as a whole is held by the discipline of sculpture, but I have incorporated live performance on-and-off since 2016.
I am currently working with these fragments which sit ambiguously between actions, materials and sculptures. What at first glance appears to be construction material has a variety of unexpected weights, and when they are moved, they tend towards collapsing, squeaking and moaning.
January 2025
@owenalherbert
owenherbert@live.co.uk