Martin Darbyshire MRSS

My practice uses different modes of making to associate with the idea of retrofuturism; to look forward whilst looking backwards. The liminal space between these temporal zones allows my work to meander until it finds its rhythm and place in the world - meaning is accumulated during and after the making, but rarely before.  Artefacts from across cultures (along with their contemporary interpretations in popular culture) interrelate to influence the shaping of the work. This imagined reality responds to our relationship with technology and its power to organise society in its image.  

I use the hybridity of assemblage, and its quality for making associations to explore the questions that arise from obsolescence - a necessary byproduct of technological advancement. My sculptures combine manufactured everyday forms with modelled or constructed objects. By playing chance against order, the old with the new, or combining the synthetic with the organic, I consider a future whose unfulfilled promise lingers over the present.   

Ideas formulate through the elemental nature of the material, of which Clay is a go to because its geological nature connects the micro to the macro. Form emerges by working spontaneously and in tune with the immediacy of the present. As a counterpoint to the haptic quality of working crudely with clay, I use the same intuitive led process, but with the precision of CAD to build image-orientated forms grounded in the geometry of vector modelling.