There is an exhibition in tate about creating artworks from various materials which is MATERIALS AND OBJECTS.
The Materials and Objects display looks at the inventive ways in which artists around the world use diverse materials.
Increasingly over the last hundred years, artists have challenged the idea that certain materials are unsuitable for art. Some employ industrial materials and methods, while others adapt craft skills, or put the throwaway products of consumer society to new uses.
The first one artwork that attracted me is Structure with Three Towers from Haegue Yang. Haegue Yang is a South Korean artist. She lives and works in Berlin and Seoul. Yang often uses standard household objects in her works, and tries to liberate them from their functional context, and apply other connotations and meaning to them. “Linguistic and didactic processes” are central features of her work. Much of Yang’s artworks attempt to provide sensory experiences through abstract narratives.
About her work-Structure with Three Towers which is made from aluminum venetian blinds, powder-coated aluminum hanging structure, steel wire rope, LED tubes and cable.
This sculpture, made in 2015, references Sol LeWitt (1928–2007), a pioneer of conceptual art who made work by following self-imposed systems. Yang reinterprets his 1986 floor-based sculpture Structure with Three Towers. She replaces the open-sided cubes of LeWitt’s sculpture with Venetian blinds, magnifies the overall structure twenty-three times, divides it into three parts and suspends the work upside down from the ceiling. This process is reflected in the title: Sol LeWitt Upside Down – Structure with Three Towers, Expanded 23 Times, Split in Three.
By connecting her work to that of a well-known artist of an earlier generation, Yang questions conventions of authorship and originality. She borrows and adapts LeWitt’s rules, while translating his structure into an environment for the viewer to walk around, through and under. Her use of the blinds means that the play of light changes as we move around the sculpture. The choice of material also brings in ideas of privacy and visibility.
The second one is the LITTLE SHOE in the list from Marisa Merz. She is a Italian sculptor who was the sole female artist associated with the arte povera movement. This shoes is a nylon-thread sculpture made for her feet. Actually, this work of art has not been given a name, because she refused to formally name or date her works. Artmaking, she claimed, operated “beyond time”. Nor was it always clear what was her labour and what was her husband’s; both worked on each other’s art in neighbouring rooms. Tommaso Trini, an Italian critic and a longtime champion of the artist, wrote in 1975 that “Marisa divided herself into Marisa and Mario. Mario divided himself in Mario and Marisa. An extraordinary community, in which identification has resisted the individualism that separates the names.”
Merz’s sculptural production often incorporates weaving and knitting – activities conventionally tied to women’s work, craft and domestic labour. The chairs, blankets, flower-filled vases and other quotidian objects in her work further signify spaces of domesticity and maternity. So do poignant references to her daughter Beatrice; a work comprised of knitting needles and woven nylon letters spelling out ‘BEA’ finds multiple iterations throughout her life. If these are the forms, subjects and techniques that ostensibly separate her from her male counterparts, they are also what endanger her to a ‘rhetoric of femininity’.
The third one is a serouis of the sculptures from Doris Salcedo who is a Colombian-born visual artist and sculptor. These artworks made from steel, wood, paint, plastic and dust. Salcedo altered the structure and applied acid to the metal surface, emphasising it grim and tortured appearance. These constructions convey unease, fragility, and a sense of trauma carried from an unkown past.
She collects witness statements and testimonies from individuals who have fallen victim to the ongoing conflict in her native Colombia between far-left guerrilla groups, the military, drug traffickers, and paramilitary forces. While these personal narratives are not immediately decipherable in the final artworks, they inform the ways in which she approaches each project, centering her process on the memories of others. “My work is based on experiences I lack,” Salcedo explained. “Therefore, it is made from an unfamiliar, unstable place, simultaneously strange and proper. It is made from an indirect perspective, and place of insufficiency from which a fragmentary, incomplete history is precariously told and retold.”
The work of Doris Salcedo is deeply rooted in her country’s social and political landscape, including its long history of civil conflicts. Her sculptures and installations address these fraught circumstances with elegance and a poetic sensibility that balances the gravitas of her subjects with subtle formality. Rather than making literal representations of violence or trauma, Salcedo’s artworks convey a sense of an absent, missing body and evoke a collective sense of loss. The resulting pieces engage with multiple dualities at once—strength and fragility, the ephemeral and the enduring—and bear elements of healing and reparation in the careful, laborious process of their making. Salcedo grounds her art in rigorous fieldwork, which involves extensive interviews with people who have experienced loss and trauma in their everyday lives. This process imbues her work with an intimate connection to the personal that speaks to collective experiences and universal emotions.
The fourth is from a series of Susumu Koshimizu works called ‘From surface to surface’ which made from Pine wood. Koshimizu Susumu was born in 1944 in Ehime Prefecture, Japan. He graduated from Sculpture Department, Tama Art University and later became one of the key members of Mono-ha, a group of artists who turned prominent in the late 1960s and 1970s. From early on, Koshimizu’s investigation of material and space resulted in some of Mono-ha’s most definitive artworks. Koshimizu’s installations and sculptures during the 1960s and 1970s focused on the qualities inherent to but not visible in an object. He shows concern for the materiality of objects—a desire to expose the fundamentals of sculpture, often revealed through juxtaposition. At the beginning of the 1970s, Koshimizu started to explore specifically the structure of surfaces.
He is one of the key members of Mono-ha, a group of artists who became prominent in the late 1960s and 1970s. Mono-ha was the name given to a loosely associated group of artists whose work was stridently anti-modernist—consisting primarily of sculptures and installations that incorporated basic materials such as rocks, sand, wood, cotton, glass and metal, often in simple arrangements with minimal artistic intervention. From early on, Susumu Koshimizu’s investigation of material and space resulted in some of Mono-ha’s most definitive artworks.