From Origins to Originals: TV
Feb 28 2023
From Origins to Originals is a new series of posts answering the question, ‘Where do you get your ideas from?’.
In these behind-the-scenes posts, we take some of our most popular works and explore the diverse influences behind them. How disparate sources and images - from art history, contemporary art, architecture, pop culture, television, film, fashion, social media, consumer culture, social history and daily life - are pulled from our collective mental archive, and then developed to create original pieces of sculpture.
First up, let’s look at our 2021 sculpture TV.
TV is made from steel, wood, polymer clay, urethane and LEDs and its dimensions are 8in (H) x 4.5in (W) x 4in (D). It’s tiny but full of pow!
A Helmet
TV is from our Oods series of sculptures. Oods were conceived as imagined objects in the uckiood universe. Instead of recreating a ‘normal’ television set with a screen which divides reality from the transmitted images, we wanted to dispense of the glass and open up space, creating volumetric depth and tangibility.
The very first images that leapt forward from our mental archive were the Helmet Head sculptures by British sculptor, Henry Moore. In these pieces, the visors are removed and one is able to move through space to touch the abstracted face within the shell. As we base a lot of our work on toys and childhood, Moore’s helmets immediately made us draw a parallel with the little white LEGO spacemen we would play with as children. The little smiley face remind you of anything?
Space Age Mid-Century & Finish Fetish
The shiny white headgear and vivid yellow face of the vintage LEGO figure shot us immediately into outer space - most specifically the Space Age interior and consumer product design craze of the late 1950s and 1960s. We were strongly attracted to the sleek, rounded, glossy white forms which were so often contrasted with stinging oranges, bottle greens, sunshine yellows, crimson reds and cyan blues. Matti Suuronen’s Futuro Houses and Eero Aarnio’s Ball Chairs encapsulated this perfectly, coming straight out of The Jetsons storyboard. This all tallied with an echo of Finish Fetish, the LA look style of art of the 1960s.
Ovals
The Futuro Houses and Orbitel - along with lighting fixtures and tables - were strong examples of the mid century modern obsession with a clean oval shape. We had used the oval or egg many times in our work and liked the idea of resurrecting it for TV. As a shape, it is more dynamic than a sphere. You can turn it on its vertical and horizontal axes to alter its force, weight and personality. And its meaning is significant - of the self, of nascent life, of fragility, of curiosity and of untapped ideas.
Our minds whizzed back into the art historical canon. One of our favorite sculptors, Barbara Hepworth, had regularly utilized egg shapes in her work, boring natural tunnels, holes or windows through and into the mass of solid plaster. This play of positive/negative space, the lateral egg form and creamy white finish in Hepworth’s minimalist sculpture allowed us to go back 400 years to Hieronymous Bosch. Although his work couldn’t be more different in medium, tone, palette and concept, he had utilized a similar shape in his representation of the hellish Tree-Man character in his gargantuan The Garden of Earthly Delights. Instead of embracing empty space as Hepworth had done, the hole or aperture in the Tree Man’s broken egg-shell bottom was filled with a tantalizing vignette scene - exactly as we intended in our TV.
Legs
The Tree-Man’s egg-shaped torso was raised off the ground with two stumpy legs. We wanted to introduce this element of elevation to our TV. Proportion and shape were key, however. It was important for us to elevate the egg shape sufficiently to create balance and lightness of form. We looked at the mid-century modern style once more, and saw that furniture legs, like Saarinen’s famous Tulip Chair, were often smooth, curved and tapered - and 100% integrated into the formal design of the object. This elegance reminded us of the simplicity of Le Corbusier’s architecture wherein the distinctive thin pilotis, or supporting columns, on each corner elevate the volume of the building. For our TV, we decided to adopt and synthesize both ideas, playing with proportion to create a sense of near perfect vertical/horizontal balance.
Candy
What could be the most seductive thing to put inside TV? As with many of our works, we were keen to pull the viewer back into childhood, this time to feel the irresistible allure of the candy shop. When formulating the mound of hard candy inside the TV cavern, we initially wanted to use sphere shapes but, on reflection, felt that the sharp, smooth resin cubes would be a great contrast to the white rounded oval of the shell. We had already used kit-kat or lozenge shapes in our previous Nugget sculpture, and the urge to touch the chunky, mouthwatering form was overwhelming - exactly the desire we wanted to elicit here. As well as echoing the soft glow of the TV screen, this appeal was emphasized even further by the luminosity of the candy pieces which was created by the embedding of an LED below the resin layer.
From the Sketchbook & the Studio
Credits
1. Henry Moore, Helmet Head No. 3, 1960. Photograph © Nigel Moore ~ 2. One of the original LEGO® Space mini figures from 1978 ~ 3. Futuro House by Matti Suuronen, 1968. Photograph © jo.schz (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0) ~ 4. Panasonic Orbitel TR-005 Flying Saucer 1971-2 ~ 5. Ball Chair by Eero Aarnio. Photograph © TheInstructionMaster (CC BY-SA 4.0) ~ 6. Barbara Hepworth, Oval Sculpture (No. 2), 1943. Photograph Barbara Hepworth © Bowness ~ 7. Hieronymous Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights, c 1500. Right Wing, Detail 2. Photograph © Frans Vandewalle (CC BY-NC 2.0) ~ 8. Monsanto House of the Future - June 12, 1957–December 1967. Photograph © MidCentArc (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0) ~ 9. Exterior. House of the Gardener of Villa Savoye. Photograph © Emanuelle Metz/CMN, taken from www.metalocus.es ~ 10. Hard Candy. Photograph © PxHere.com (CC0 1.0)