Gravity reveals a body of work that balances between the analogue and the digital, the controlled and the chaotic, the work offers a dialogue between the serene and the dynamic, the natural and synthetic as well as the hand-made and the industrial. Offering an emotional narrative on the process, conceptualisation and manufacture of each piece of work, Gravity reveals Fredrikson Stallard’s interest in the process of creation and destruction, alongside the controlled technology that ultimately enables its creation.
Gravity offers a path of consciousness that has developed as the design house has observed the interplay between digital technology and manufacturing techniques alongside their analogue creativity.
The duality and contradiction between chaos and control has achieved, within ‘Gravity’, a visual language that juxtaposes the calm with the disrupted, the fissures and fractures with the smooth and the stable – Gravity is collection of work which sits on the edge between two worlds; pivoting between two states of play. Archaic forms are created but always under strict control.
In many of the pieces where acrylic has been used, each piece becomes four dimensional, as the edges are blurred and the reaction to and manipulation of light ensures that the work is no longer an inanimate object but one that reacts more intimately to its own environment, offering yet further layers of narrative.
Gravity as a collection is effortless. Acrylic is used alone or combined with patinated steel – tactile red velvet is set against rigorous structures. As with Fredrikson Stallard’s past work, there is no added or superfluous decoration – every piece is paired down to the essential and fundamental elements. Form no longer follows function – form is form and the object is the only element that is of importance – the object and its relationship with the emotion that created it. Computer CADs are left to their ‘natural’ forms – un-manipulated, as though the digital form has been allowed to retain its analogue sensibilities.
Gravity opens to the public 9th March – 7th April 2016
