Jacek Wankowski

ARTIST'S STATEMENT
SCULPTURE

I am fascinated by the underwater world: the strange, fragile life forms that live there and the huge forces of tide and current that surge around them. I have explored this world via my studies in marine biology and during my early professional life as a marine biologist in Scotland, Papua New Guinea and Australia. My practice offers a dynamic, personal perspective and builds on the abstract Modernist traditions of international sculpture from the past 80 years – Moore, Lewitt, Pepper, Serra, Goldsworthy, Caro, Kapoor, Twombly, Gehry, Hadid.

To a large extent, my work is "a reaction to the denial of self" * – a characteristic of much recent conceptual art which uses appropriations and readymades, real-world objects untransformed by the artist and brought into the studio and gallery as art. In contrast, my practice is concerned with the handmade, work made entirely by the sculptor, the material transformed from one state of being to an other, and which still shows the marks of the making process.

My sculptures are mostly made in steel but include other materials as appropriate. They range from large scale, outdoor pieces to smaller, intimate works – a play between the small and the large scale, between intricacy and simplicity. Inspired by observation of pattern and form in the natural world and spatially activated by the distribution of their mass, they are intended to embody movement and anticipation, and often a sense of unfolding, unwrapping or opening.

Some pursue that moment between balance and flight where the precise distribution of mass, form and space activate the sculpture – a creative engineering that aims to imbue a potency of energy, of aerial lightness, or alternatively of crushing weight.

Others explore how the tension generated by environmental forces interacts with and is reflected by the complex external forms of small invertebrate sea creatures – molluscs, sea hares, copepods, rotifers, barnacles, sea lilies, nereid worms . . . . . . Often made by folding/unfolding steel surfaces, their external boundaries are held together and shaped by complex internal structures, and both these elements form a visible part of the finished work. These works are concerned with how the essentially soft structure of living organisms can be embodied in the spirit of a hard-edged 'industrial' object. Reflecting the fact that steel is hard and unyielding, while animals are by their nature soft, flexible and pliable, these sculptures keep to the spirit of an industrial artifact even while describing a biomorphic form.

My other main body of work explores the dynamic flow and force of the ocean's waves, currents, tsunamis and storms and their interaction with marine geographic and geological features – reefs, coral, seashore archipelagos, seaweed forests. This work is significantly influenced by mythical and archaeological imagery, such as the Chimaera and ancient megalithic structures.

I work in a variety of steels: mild, galvanised, corten, stainless. My steel is highly worked: cut, shaped, welded and bolted; ground, electroplated, hot-dip galvanized, heat-treated; oxidised, patinated, painted; cut back and relieved. These treatments often result in the development of quite complex surfaces. My intention is to keep the 'industrial' nature of the work clear and unambiguous – the surface treatments deliberately retaining the 'grain' and other marks of the making process.

Constructed through additive processes, the components are pre-formed and joined symbiotically. Thus, they relate to each other as surfaces, as individual entities and as parts of the whole. The interplay of the spaces and hollows between the components is as important as the individual parts themselves – tension results from the desire to integrate these spaces and to explore how they respond to each other, the physical elements, and the piece as a whole.

My work is intended to interact directly and unambiguously with its immediate visual, physical and human environment. Many of my outdoor pieces are envisaged for installation in a natural or soft non-industrial environment – on grass or old flagstones, amongst trees or with a backdrop of weathered brickwork or stone, where surface patinas will gradually develop with age.

* A quote from Phyllida Barlow RA, in 2011 in describing her practice.