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The making of a Vessel
Catalogue foreword by Andrew Southall
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To accompany Maelstrom Trinity, a CFPR publication documenting work undertaken and editions published during a residency at the Centre for Print Research, UWE.
Link to the Centre for Print Research >
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May 2023
The exterior of Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim gallery in Bilbao is more a sculptural facade than a building. Its wild shapes were conceived with the aid of CAD and reportedly could not have been drawn on paper. The building’s architectural landscape was rendered virtually within computer software and then emerged materially – seemingly impossibly – into the world beyond the architect’s screen. For the most part, the building interior is more prosaic.
Chuck Elliott’s Maelstrom Trinity is playing in similar territory. The sculpture, initially rough hewn in thought and geometric calculation, speculation and intent, subsequently presents a facsimile of rock as plinth – as sculpture – as metaphor – as reliquary and as none of these. It connects a casting of stone with multiple glass sectional components, interlocking, interdependent and each individually devoid of colour, but primed ready to refract light passing through them.
All the glass we know was once liquid. In three dimensional and sculptural form, such structures can seem both fixed and transient, as if for glass, time is fixed whilst its surroundings move on. It is somewhere here that Elliott’s intent is focused, not so much on the object he is making but through it. He speaks of light travelling within his sculpture, as if the form itself is a necessary contrivance to allow this phenomenon to happen. Viewers themselves come into this play – at once locked outside and lost within the glass maze of possibilities.
The world of graphic computer rendering is not generally a haptic process, unless you count the clicking of the mouse and the softened tap of the keyboard. Any two dimensional image that emerges from the screen into material form is held across two states, within and without: There is a tension between these; the light emitting diodes of the screen and light reflecting from pigment on paper.
Elliott’s Capsule editions of etchings link a digital rendering process to the mechanical process of a hand operated etching press, where the inking of a plate is a familiar haptic process. Here the screen geometrics of the image undergo a “real world” treatment of inking up and impressing onto cotton paper stock. The image, impossible to draw physically on one plane, has escaped the screen and emerges as a curious hybrid, on our side of it.
This kind of disparity of surface and light is not necessarily photographic but all such imagery shares the same lineage.
When Daguerre captured a Paris street scene in 1839, complete with a figure having their shoes shined, he seems somehow to have fixed the light of that day for posterity. The technology was so new then, that the figure depicted could not have known of the existence of this process. “Drawing with light” as Fox Talbot characterised his own photographic process, was not yet well known.
The process of transmission, of light transference, fixing and rendering has become an endless language game, one in which the wonder of an image is bound to how it enables the viewer to look back as well as forward. One is lost in a past time, which is concurrently projected into the present and future. It is fixed, yet promises transition. This is a forever paradox and it is consequently infuriatingly compelling. Screen based simulacrum are depicted just beyond the veil of pigment, just the other side of the screen, just out of reach.
Elliott’s sculpture and prints are games of language, inside and outside, fixed, fluid and transitional. Their quizzical status allow us to explore the position of the technology they are made with, the position of the maker and of the viewer. The object is a facilitator, a refractor of light and thought, without a fixed intent, nor a final resolution. These works are charged with a purpose, at once acutely focused, multitudinous and non specific. They are vessels as vassal; where the objects are subservient to the attentions of the viewer, providing them with a means to explore both deep within a process and beyond themselves.
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Andrew Southall
Subject and course leader, MA Design, Bath Spa University.