Ever Grainger MRSS
Grainger's silicone-based artworks and installations are concerned with the material nature of sculpture, layered with their potential engagement with individual viewers and the physicality of the spaces they are seen or installed within.
Her work with silicone sets out to distil and capture the process of creating work, to retain the moment of making as still tangibly present. Working freehand with an adapted extrusion gun, silicone is squeezed, squashed and drawn with, in a process that balances negotiating tool and material led outcomes with intuition and control.
Silicone is favoured by Grainger as a modern material that is at once liquid and solid, soft and firm. Made from silica - sand - as its core ingredient, its unique properties of setting, taking a detailed impression, grabbing and yet being flexible and non-stick, have made it ideal in the art world for the processes of mould-making and casting. In various formulas it is also known more commonly as the tubed material to fill gaps and seal building materials.
Works such as ‘Slabbs' exaggerate the contact of surfaces with a secondary process where side formers flatten and press in. ‘Drape’ is drawn out and elongated, travelling and feeling its way over an edge. Most to date are devised so the forms are cured without being fixed and so can be installed in multiple locations.
The work is a development of a history of negotiating tool-based aspects of making work. With current computer technology removing the need for any physical interaction, eg. the devising of sculpture with 3D modelling software, through to 3D printing, Grainger instead returns to more basic level tools where physical overrides, and responsive control in the moment are still possible as a way of attempting to retain contact and negotiate this dilemma.