The Allegory of Caves is a theory coined by Plato to describe human perception. Plato believed that knowledge gained through philosophical reasoning was more real than knowledge gained through the senses. He explains that if you believe that, what you are seeing is the truth then it is just a faction or a shadow of the truth. Truth is, in fact, extensive and should not be taken at face value.
This theory forms the basis of my work in materiality. My work is concerned with an exploration of how materials can be experienced not just through a face value perception but as a philosophical connection. Materiality by definition is the tacit knowledge of a material in a way that cannot be really expressed in words or symbols. Materiality is connected to instincts and is often a learned experience. The meaning of the material is not just merely the meaning of it being a ‘thing’ but is associated with the abstractedness of it.
The glass sculptures in this artwork are not just glass in its functional sense. Here they take a form that cannot be related to its physical form but more to its abstract existence. These sculptures denote fragility, delicacy and sharpness. They look fragile and violent at the same time and this aids us to imagine the different forms that the material is capable of becoming. I am interested in the effect that the material produces and to test these effects I brought the material into a 2D realm by converting the forms to photograms. The photograms evoke a sense of suspension in space like Xrays they connote a certain coldness and a distance. It is uncanny how this broken glass has different truths in different spaces. And as a viewer, you are free to bring your own truth to the table.
