Rust never sleeps: How can material exploration contribute to an understanding of time and place in contemporary sculpture and installation art?

Abstract

My project explores my ongoing investigation employing an amalgamation of processes in relation to an emergent discussion regarding the vulnerability and fragility of things; the passing of time and site as expressed in a sculptural and installation discourse.

The temporal nature of installation art is a vital mode of art practice which allows me to continually question and explore the possibilities of how materials can shift and transform to inform a discussion surrounding memory and how the viewer experiences place as temporal when operating within an expansive field.

This brings me to my proposed research question: How can material exploration contribute to an understanding of time and place in contemporary sculpture and installation art?

Through researching contemporary artist’s Bosco Sodi, Claudi Casanovas, Jorge Otero- Pailos, Robert Rauschenberg, The Boyle Family, Antony Gormley and Robert Smithson along with alternatives to the white cube model (outside the white walled gallery space) I have uncovered numerous strategies that can be deployed in the making and showing of temporal artworks. Entropy is explored through continuous material experimentation, engaging with the transformative properties of materials, and applying processes associated with ceramic and sculptural practice in unexpected ways thus generating new propositions. Further to this, works produced will be considered in situ, referential of the transformation undertaken in order to activate a space and generate a re-reading of site. Implicit throughout is an inquiry into the role of the viewer as integral, for it is through experiencing the work that meaning can be established and an understanding of the temporal articulated.