Colin Goodfellow @intentstudio

Sculptor’s Painting and Hot This

My name is colin goodfellow and I am a sculptor and installation artist working in found objects and both hot and cold metal. The two pieces in the exhibition explore materiality, form, and perception. The two are engaged in a dialogue about perception’s malleability.

These works are a continuation of my exploration of molten metal as the object rather than just the material of an object. This is about the metal’s capacity to the engage viewer (and the artist) on its own terms.

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The first piece Sculptor’s Painting is a set of seemingly similar rectangles of aluminum.  At play is the development of a technique for painting with hot metal. The painting technique is a steel mesh substrate placed above a metal sheet that is heavily dusted with foundry sand. The mesh functions as a canvass with the sand and backing preventing the liquid metal from pouring through the mesh until the paint is dried. Painting becomes the process of applying the liquid metal.

Sculptor as a discipline has been slow to adopt the methods of painting while painting has continued to evolve, adopting sculptural dimensionality. Both practices seem increasingly untethered in the permissive breadth of contemporary art. As a sculptor then the reference to Robert Rauschenberg’s White Painting is about asserting a discipline-to-discipline dialogue. Further echoing White Painting, Sculpture’s Painting reiterates the importance of material in perception, asking the viewer to consider the material when its is presented simply. This ask is then contrasted with an aluminum abstraction piece to suggest the potential available for molten pour.

The second piece Hot This is a free form organic abstract work. It functions as a counter piece to the formal simplicity in Sculptor’s Painting. The metal form has colour and shape and embodies the potential for the molt medium. The metal work is accompanied by photographs of itself seen in different orientations. This invites the viewer to consider both medium’s (photo vs. physical) role in perceptions and perceptions innate in us. Can innate figuration be resisted or amplified in this way? Does It depend on how one looks at it?

The photographs accentuate different images (perceived figurations) available within the work. They further introduce new material and the visual discipline of photography. They extend the viewer’s relationship of the works along the continuum of material, form, abstraction, and figuration The two works together, Sculpture’s Painting and Hot This  provide a brief introduction both experiential and observational to the potential of sculpture as painting. Or was that the other way around?