«During my time in academia, the path to your artwork consisted of collecting historical analogues, sketching them, clause, sketch, project sketch, project in pencil/charcoal, project in watercolor on a stretched paper tablet, material sample, material. In those 9 rounds, I used to have time to hate my idea. Now I just make random ink drawings on paper, no correction allowed, photograph them and enlarge them to a metre, two, three metres.
And then I load into the laser cutting machine not a blueprint, but a photo of the drawing, and the machine starts to go crazy, it starts to cut what and how it wants, creating a non-man-made, non-random new plastic language.
The bronze figures were created this way - I sketched out the letters sent to me from the project participants and then carved them wildly in the laser.
The aesthetics of breakage, failure, glitch, while we see intuitively recognisable images. I find the move of using as ‘raw’ materials as possible, such as metal, unpainted brass, interesting. They make the whole absurdity too real, minus-minus equals +, thus encoding the visual image as unreal, but existing here and now. This is due to the fact that the laser cut always somehow resembles a scar that has healed, and the pain exists ‘now’, is physically felt by the body.»
Liza Bobkova
