Ben Lee - Artist Statement
My practice is engaged with the development of narratives for new geometry through the intersection of sculptural process and photographic technique.
My aim is to script the generative logic inherent within the image and thus dictate the means of possible engagement. I aim to provoke reaction to the imagery presented by instigating a complexity within the image that questions the origins of the forms present through their interaction and projection onto the native environment of the site they are situated in.
The development of this work has been to propose simultaneous dialogues for the viewer, to engage them with possible questions that they themselves are framing when confronted with the imagery. My aim is to find a complexity whereby the observer begins to project their own explanations, as the reality is lost amidst the impenetrability of the new geometries’ outsider context.
The current production processes of making the forms within the works, follows classical sculptural techniques of casting in order to allow me to remain in touch with a physical practice, which I find important, as it allows for me, as the artist, to understand the generative logics that I am scripting from an outside perspective.
Development has been through engagement with peers and contemporaries in a collaborative initiative where those involved participate in a short duration exhibition with work produced with no pre-determined ideas. My approach here was the interrogation of a ‘non’ or ‘contested’ space; zones that we pass through or overlook completely, owing to either their over-use and high maintenance or their inaccessibility and combining this ‘conspicuous inconspicuousness’ of space with the rupture and hybridisation of geometries. These sites often propose indeterminacy, and I am aiming to narrate the fluxes within them by the confrontations in them passing beyond conventional understanding and enter into a sublime nature in tandem with a modern gothic; belonging ‘somewhere else’, with an inherent menace portrayed within the fiction as a non-engagement in the physical now. The work presented is a further development of these narratives.
When the fissures between mind and matter multiply into an infinity of gaps, the studio begins to crumble and fall so that mind and matter get endlessly intertwined and as quoted by Descartes (1596-1650); “Give me matter and motion and I will construct the universe.” For me the studio is not the site for my practice, as the production of my work centres on a constructed narrative of observational photography and it is through documentation that the image is given apparent life. As Groys said “The Artistic documentation, whether real or fictive, is by contrast, primarily narrative, and thus it evokes the unrepeatability of living time. The artificial can thus be made living, made natural, by means of documentation, by narrating the history of its origin, its “making”. I am trying to create a fictitious axiomatic paradigm to “remove the rigidity of thought” (Richard Feynman) that limits the quest to visualise that which lies outside our normal field of view where the formation of these new visible geometries are founded in intangible structures.
