Sculpture as artifice: mimetic form in the environment

Abstract

Can natural and artificial patterning (camouflage) intersect with organic systems and entropic forces in nature to symbiotically link a sculpture to its environment? Through practice led, theory-based research, studio investigation and field study, I will develop a sculptural earthwork called Mud Dispositions. My aim is to test if an object, unrelated to a site, can be given a patina that relates it to that site. I will then demonstrate how deleterious environmental factors (rainfall and extreme heat and cold, combined with wildlife activity and microbial dissolution) can break down the soluble composition of the artwork in a ‘hostile’ process of decomposition and repatriation that will define it as an impermanent imposition on site to best illustrate dynamic forces present. I will look at the origins of camouflage in nature, examining essays by Charles Darwin, Abbott Thayer, Ann Elias and David Haskell, and explore its militaristic uses, focussing on the development of camouflage patterns by Roy R. Behrens, Norman Wilkinson and United States Army field manuals. I will also consider alternative adaptations of obfuscation, including psychological deception (Ganzfeld effect) and mathematical pattern generation (Voronoi diagrams). I will analyse the work of a selection of artists who work in unconventional fields and who focus on the physicality of objects in space. These will include Andy Goldsworthy, Olafur Eliasson, Agnes Denes and Angela Bulloch. The displacement of an object from its original setting to a new location necessitates a renegotiation of the correlation between an object and site. I will discuss this statement in relation to Rosalind Krauss’ views on the conceptual boundaries between sculpture/site; Prudence Gibson’s essays on plant art, eco-aesthetics and urban/peri-urban environments; Robert Smithson’s site/non-site land art; and Richard Goodwin’s sculptural interventions on architecture. I argue that a set of variables (or masking techniques, including decay of form itself), when applied to a sculptural installation, influence its visual apprehension, spatiality and ephemerality in the environment, challenging more orthodox relationships that can exist between an object and site. Drawn directly from the land, Mud Dispositions’ malleability will interconnect it with local habitat—a commonality of materials will create a language and bond that anchors form to site