Martin Darbyshire MRSS

My practice mines the past and a future whose unfulfilled promise lingers over an exhausted present. 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 more recent interpretations in popular culture) interrelate to shape the work. The action of looking back is a search for an authentic experience presumed to be present in childhood, and slowly eroded by our ever-more complex relationship with technology and its power to organise society in its image.

Commonly, 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 use the process of making to reveal something new. 

Connecting to the elemental and tactile nature of materials is part of the authentic experience, and Clay is a go-to because of its relationship to time, which 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 lead process, but with the precision of CAD to build image-oriented forms grounded in the geometry of vector modelling.