| The inclination toward nothingness is unrelenting. There is a point at which sculpture, from antiquity for example, usually made of stone and left exposed to the elements is reclaimed as material, its social and cultural meaning worn away as representation fades. This is when sculpture is in a pure material state, and exposes a kind of universal truth. This point seems a good time to begin making work. By dealing with the physical and material states of objects I hope to engage with some of this universal truth in material form, and I see it as something that has been overlooked especially in Western cultural history. |  |
Adam Humphries
The inclination toward nothingness is unrelenting. There is a point at which sculpture, from antiquity for example, usually made of stone and left exposed to the elements is reclaimed as material, its social and cultural meaning worn away as representation fades. This is when sculpture is in a pure material state, and exposes a kind of universal truth. This point seems a good time to begin making work.
By dealing with the physical and material states of objects I hope to engage with some of this universal truth in material form, and I see it as something that has been overlooked especially in Western cultural history. Dust is a very important material state, the point at which perhaps we are last able to perceive a material’s identity before it is retrieved by the primordial soup ready to exist for a while as something else. A dust is where material has its most potential.
Making studies in polystyrene, which I see as a type of schematic matter for the material world, I hope to push the sense of the object past normal perception into something that makes reference to something much, much larger: the micro to the macro, the universe in a grain of sand, banal snippet to the cosmological. The material is also very important in these pieces because it allows all the objects to break down to one single constant piece of matter—the poly bead that acts as dust in these landscapes.
