ARTIST'S STATEMENT

My work is concerned with contextual formal relationships, physicality and the nature and perception of beauty.
Firstly, relationships between formal compositional elements and between form and it's immediate micro environment (the surface on which a form rests or appears to grow out of and proximity to other forms or voids).
Secondly, a form's relationship to the wider environment for example its dependence on gravity and it's consequent orienting and even limiting effect.
Thirdly, I am interested in the sheer physicality of materials and our interaction with them.
Fourthly, I am also interested in the concept and nature of beauty. My work represents an attempt to discover beauty rather than, as I see it, to create it.

My method of working is mainly premeditated and thus non-spontaneous. The ideas for my designs may arrive spontaneously but are most often the result of working and reworking ideas in a sketchbook, drawing board or on the computer. My work relies on an appreciation of geometry, mathematical models, astronomy and structures within civil engineering and architecture.

Early work explored spherical and cylindrical shapes and their juxtaposition and a consideration of a variety of axes and points of rotation. My use of the lathe in these experiments gave further voice to the rotational element of my work. Further control was exercised by using birch plywood allowing the alignment of the laminated 'strata' vertically, horizontally or at an angle to accentuate mass, breadth, depth, height or dynamic. Much of this work followed or replicated the work of early abstract minimalists such as Vantergoloo et al in the early C20.

Throughout this work I have been interested in exploring changes of viewing aspect from the conventional inside/outside paradigm of vessels to more expansive linear visual landscapes and more solid geometric and organic conceptualisations exploring conventional sculptural concerns of mass and void. Recent work on complex organic forms has been in conjunction with computer controlled technology using Three Axis Computer Numerically Controlled (CNC) milling machines.

Richard Hooper
January 2005