LUKE HART: ON THE ANATOMY OF SCULPTURE
Sculptor Luke Hart blends raw industrial materials into fine art with a core functional purpose. His work has been exhibited worldwide with his first solo exhibition, Joinery, currently on show at Tim Sheward Projects in London’s Bankside.
Hart graduated from the Pratt Institute, New York in 2007 before completing his MA in Sculpture at the Royal College of Art this year. #MAG catches up with the London artist to discover the drive and inspiration behind his very technical looking masterpieces.
Have you always taken a very mechanical approach to sculpture?
Only in a superficial respect. I came to sculpture through an interest in anatomy, and for a while I was focused on biological form, but only really in terms of the surface of that form. Throughout this period I was always seeking to find a way to allow the work itself to take on its own existence in the world, to justify itself and allow the work to perform an action, I tried a wide variety of methods to do this, most of which failed. I eventually discovered a method of creating chemical bonds between cast rubber, which I knew a lot about, and steel, about which I knew little, and by utilising this process to join two pieces of steel by way of a piece of rubber which had enough room to allow the steel parts to flex in relation to each other I felt that I had discovered what I had been failing to do with the anatomical work, the piece could simply bend, and that was enough of a potential action, or perhaps function, for me to think that the work was inhabiting the world at large, rather than simply the world of art.
In so much as an elbow or a hip joint is mechanical, my interests have always been mechanical, but by allowing the actual mechanical process of the work to take over, I think that the work has become more successful, and it has led my interests in more mechanical, more functional, directions.
What are your favoured materials?
I clearly have a fondness for rubber, which I think is wonderful stuff that has more potential uses than industry currently exploits. This is understandable, as rubber is expensive and difficult to work with, but I don't think that this should necessarily be prohibitive to experimentation. Prior to the invention of synthetic rubber, natural rubber was so expensive and difficult to harvest, that it led to what was essentially slave labour in the countries where it grew, to Henry Ford establishing an artificial, and failure, of a city in Brazil, and to near wars between colonial powers. Synthetic rubber is also problematic, as it is a derivative of oil, but there are more sustainable alternatives, which are not yet being used to produce rubber in the ways that they will have to in the future. That said I think that it is dangerous for a sculptor to favour a single material too heavily, we're no longer in the time when one can simply work one medium, because what we do now is not produce images, or pictures, based on manipulating a material, but, hopefully, try to combine types of stuff in interesting methods and configurations based around the confines of a specific problem. What that problem is can be anything from a purely functional issue relating to advancing human making, or it can be purely sculptural. I'm also quite fond of steel, and of wood and cabinet making, but I hope that none of these things could be said to sum up my practice.
Your larger exhibits at TSP look like they could form part of a construction, do they work in reality?
The two larger sculptural joints(Fractal Weave Joint III and Fractal Weave Joint IV) in the exhibition are part of a body of work called Fractal Weave Structure I, which is also a single work in itself. They are components of a structure that is composed of large pieces of steel tube section, and the joints on show. The work has three legs, which are bolted to the floor, and each leg is composed of two flexible rubber joints which bend into place before the keystone (FWJ IV) is bolted into the top of the dome. The joints themselves function both in terms of flexing to allow the larger work to be put together, as well as structurally. When it is assembled there is about a half-ton of steel supported above the viewer entirely by the rubber joints. In terms of performing that action they work quite well, there is even a fail safe built into their design, when rubber splits, a small split can travel through the whole form very quickly, if the joints were solid, they would perhaps be stronger, but a single split could easily bring the whole structure down by breaking any of the individual joints. The weave pattern ensures that a split in any one section of weave cannot travel through the entire joint, so even if one piece of rubber fails, the whole structure will still be sound, albeit flexible.
Do the sculptures presented in boxes have an actual function for use?
Not at the moment, but potentially. The smaller works are experiments, both in thought and formal arrangement of multiple parts of steel bonded by parts of cast rubber, which then informs how I think about the larger works. They may not have an immediate use-value, but I believe that they function in the same manner that the larger works function.
In comparison to the larger orange/steel pieces, the sculptures you create as a cast for the finished products are quite elegant; can you explain the process from one to the other?
The initial hand worked masters, which mould-makers refer to as a pattern, are made from steel, so that the mould later on fits the same way around the pattern as it does around the part of steel inserted into the mould to be bonded, and from car body filler. The filler is a lovely material that is generally used to repair holes or dents in the bodies of cars, but which I find my favourite material for modelling in. When it is fresh it can be sculpted almost like clay or wax, but once it hardens, it is strong enough to support the weight of the steel parts, and hard enough to be carved, almost like soft stone, a process for which I still use my old stone carving tools. For the Fractal Weave Joints I carve the patterns by hand, after designing them by drawing and making small maquettes to work out the logic of the weave, each of those usually takes a couple of months, and this process creates an intimate relationship with the form of the joint, in both this state and the finished cast. The patterns are then covered in layers of silicone rubber to create a mould, then fibreglass to support that flexible mould, then the whole thing is taken apart, re-assembled with the new treated steel parts, and injected with liquid rubber, that cures and bonds with the steel. While I have a great intimacy with the patterns, which comes from working on them for extended periods, and I appreciate that viewers are often interested by them, sometimes to the point of preferring them to the rubber works, I don't consider them finished works, just studio detritus.
Where do you see your sculptures having a home?
Generally each of the works has its own portable home, in the form of its own purpose built box. I like the idea of them travelling in their own protective cases to wherever they need to be (like a carpenter's tools,) sometimes being used, sometimes just being looked at. That said, I think that many of the works can inhabit any space, even domestic space, quite well utilising the built in methods of display inherent in the boxes, but they can also be assembled into greater structures, which can sit in landscape, (once there is a proper treatment on the exposed steel) or indoors. I'm quite partial to seeing the work in abandoned industrial space, either indoors or outdoors.
Where do you find your inspiration?
On the street, in cities, in looking at anything that has been put together by a human being. It is possible to trace someone's thought process in looking at something that they made, every single little detail was once a person's conscious decision, and reading those decisions is very enjoyable. The same can be said of looking at drawings. When we look at drawings, we're tracing the thoughts of the person who made the drawing, and if one has ever made a drawing (and I think that we all have at some point in our lives) then one can compare the decisions that the draughtsperson made with those that one might make oneself. This is the joy of looking at art, but it is also the joy of looking at anything.
What are you working on at the moment?
An extrapolation of a small work that I made nearly two years ago called Plate Joint, it was a simple, early example of bonding two pieces of steel plate, and setting the bend at a complex angle with a piece of wire. I'm currently making the thing larger and inverting it so that is sits on an uneven surface as a type of bridge. At the scale of a bridge it could be fabricated in a workshop and installed at a site by crane, the bridge itself would adjust to rest on whatever terrain it was required to. I'm building what I call a functional maquette for it, which behaves exactly the way that a full scale work would, but also works as a model.
If you could build anything what would it be?
I have drawings for structures which, while on land, are entirely floating. Picture a large building with an enormous cavernous space below ground level, through this cavern, are the pylons which support the whole building, but rather than being forced into the bedrock below or into a concrete foundation, the pylons are all connected to a structure similar to a ship's hull, extrapolated and expanded to resemble the footprint of the building and floating in a non-corrosive liquid, such as a type of oil. This is all then floating in channels which again mirror the building's footprint. If done right, the building could be entirely structurally sound, and yet nearly immune from shifts in landscape, or even, potentially, from tectonic tremors or earthquakes. I'm playing with floating structure in a number of ways right now, but this is a long term vision.
Luke Hart | Joinery runs 08 Nov to 07 Dec 2013 @ Tim Sheward Projects
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