Thesis \ Deprogramming Material Minds
Shortlisted June 2022 for the John Byrne Award
‘During the Renaissance, Spanish sculptors who made mistakes while carving expensive marble often patched their flaws with cera - ‘wax’. A statue that had no flaws and required no patching was hailed as a ‘sculpture sin cera’ or a ‘sculpture without wax.’ The phrase eventually came to mean anything honest or true. The English word ‘sincere’ evolved from the Spanish sin cera - ‘without wax’.’
The thesis served to explore making and freeing our minds conceptually from traditional materials. The initial explorations served to explore material in an abstract sense, in this case using wax and how additives changed its nature. The approach, rather than use 'real' materials, was to look at materials at the margin of architecture. Calling on the conceptual approaches of artists, notably the Arte Povera movement, Eva Hesse, Pino Pascali etc, the very nature of an appropriate material was questioned. This sense of freedom or breaking loose will become more and more critical as the construction industry seeks carbon free materials.
The outcome can be regarded as a series of pieces almost sculptural in their physicality but the real lesson is in bringing a different attitude to specification; one that is more agile, more open to 'what if we...?'