Camberwell College of Arts   2009/2010

Nick Hornby

I’ve recently come up against a brick wall, and I’m hoping to find some answers in clay at Camberwell.

In the last 12 months I've worked on projects at Tate Britain and at The Southbank Centre with a group of young people - raising issues of subjectivitivy, plurality, interpertation and authorship.

These issues have grown into a series of difficult questions that I want to try to answer through a new body of work.

For example: what happens when you superimpose three sculptures on top of one another taking away the differences and leaving only their common ground? “What revenue is still produced by their out-of-service dereliction, what surplus value is unleashed by the annulment of their use?” And what type of mongrel will it produce: Lyrical abstractions or Giacometti-esque skeletons? Is an artwork always the divisible as the sum of its parts (its inspiration, its making)?

Where does an idea come from? Is it the sum of many other ideas? Is it always borrowed or stolen? How far back can a viewer go in search of it? Does (s)he look for the sources, the inspiration, a meaning? Or for the Artist, a romantic figure? Where do my ideas come from? What do I mean? For Heidegger you look outside the frame. For sculpture you can walk around it.

In Mythologies, Roland Barthes set up a dichotomy between the abstract - the “superlative object” with its “perfection and absence of origin”, which looks as though it has “fallen from the sky”, and its opposite: “the technical and typically human operation of assembling”.

I'm hoping to think about mechanism, filters, translation, and notions of objectivity and subjectivity. I'm hoping to do this by switchbing back and forth between my current virtual CAD models, with these clay objects that I'm proposing to do at Camberwell ceramics department.

These sculptures would be the imaginary physical space that co-exists between several things. I would like to work directly with my hands - to make one offs that are fragile and unique. I want to use clay because of its plastic nature, its histories and its associations.