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W. Shawn Gray
BACKGROUND
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My
art practice has moved through
sculpture, computer-graphic
film / video, other conceptual
projects, painting and back to
bronze casting and fabricated
metal sculptures. (Lack of
funds, or concepts temporarily
outstripping technical
thresholds, have been the main
catalysts for the shifts in
practice).
While
studying at East Sydney Tech.
in the 1970's, I discovered an
affinity for bronze casting,
though I found the economic
imperatives for small scale,
combined with traditional
expectations for works in the
medium stifling. The classical
critique of the welded steel
tradition was also challenging,
but the usage of heavy steel
plate seemed to mandate
cumbersome heavy pieces that
for the most part crawled
across the landscape.
After
working with the various other
mediums I stuck on my current
solution to my sculptural
aesthetic dichotomy. The
involvement in a number of
mediums also tuned my
understanding of the
appropriateness of different
subject to medium combinations.
Finding sculpture particularly
apt for capturing spiritual
concerns as architecture has
historically done so well, or
talking about the
dehumanisation of the
post-industrial society.
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AESTHETIC STRATEGY
I
am interested in evolving
motifs, that draw on the spirit
and iconography of my Celtic
ancestry, fusing these with the
broader spiritual expression of
the more universal
architectural / sculptural
forms of Indo-european culture
to be poured out as an uniquely
Australian expression of late
twentieth century concerns.
By
way of illustration it is an
attempt in the visual sphere,
what has to some degree been so
successfully accomplished with
Bush Dance Music, where one has
the Celtic musical roots,
flowing through the broad
Indo-european instrumentation,
to combine into something
uniquely Australian, more so
today as didgeridoos and other
native devices have influenced
what was primarily a white 19th
century music.
The
strategy is to utilise common
design primitives like the
'spiral' to defocus the
boundaries of the individual
cultural sources.
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THEMATIC CONCERNS
The
post-industrial age is often
characterized by a sense of
futility at the overwhelming
complexity and suffocating
volumes of data spawned by the
information revolution. This
bewilderment drives many
towards the crudest
characterizations and base
value systems (typically
utilitarian or monetary one),
in a panic to get some handle
on the chaotic world they find
themselves in.
I
am concerned with making works
that highlight the
dehumanisation of this process
on humanity, or other
manifestation and products of
this bankruptcy of value
systems.
A
counterpoint theme in my oeuvre
turns on the power of art (
particularly sculpture in the
three dimensionality of it's
experiencing) to impact on the
viewer in a non-rational /
a-rational way or at an
intuitive level. Experience and
understanding can only ever be
imputed as opposed to
replicated for another. Through
the leverage of the work as an
entity and it symbolic
references, I'm striving to
provide the viewer an insight
into my spiritual matrix and
the liberating power it has
provided for me in a
post-industrial age.
The
themes I am currently working
with address the
post-industrial condition with
a transfusion of firstly
Celtic, then other
Indo-european spiritual
heritages.
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CURRENT STATUS
Since
1977 I have been developing
these concerns in notebooks,
project outlines and partially
completed waxes. I currently
have over fifty distinctly
different pieces of sculpture I
could start today (given time,
materials & space). The
majority of the ideas having
evolved in the last two years,
while working on the examples
supplied.
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