Martin Darbyshire United Kingdom

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I am a London based sculptor who explores the interstices between stuff. My work has been exhibited across the UK, and I am an elected member of The London Group, and the Royal Society of Sculptors. I have received and been nominated for prizes and grants that recognise my commitment to exploring contemporary sculptural practice.

My practice has two strands which associate with the idea of retrofuturism; to look forward whilst looking backward. The liminal space between these temporal zones allows my work to meander until it finds its rhythm and place in the world - meaning is accumulated during and after the making, but rarely before. Artefacts from across cultures (along with their contemporary interpretations in popular culture) interrelate to influence the shaping of the work. This imagined reality is a response to our relationship with technology and its power to organise society in its image.

I use the hybridity of assemblage, and its quality for making associations to explore the questions that arise from obsolescence - a necessary byproduct of technological advancement. My sculptures combine manufactured everyday forms with modelled or constructed objects. By playing chance against order, the old with the new, or combining the synthetic with the organic, I consider a future whose unfulfilled promise lingers over the present.

Ideas formulate through the elemental nature of the material, of which Clay is a go to because its geological nature connects the micro to the macro. Form emerges by working spontaneously, and in tune with the immediacy of the present. As a counterpoint to the haptic quality of working crudely with clay, I use the same intuitive led process, but with precision of CAD to build image-orientated forms grounded in the geometry of vector modelling.

Artwork

Ejecta , Stoneware, 2023

Martin Darbyshire United Kingdom Back to profiles Invite to apply

Artwork

Martin Darbyshire United Kingdom

Back to profiles