ARTIST STATEMENT

I want the work to express my need, but also, our social need, for tactile engagement, tactile experiences, immediacy beyond screen-based interactions.

What I've affected on the metal itself, and the work is a process of trying to humanize a material that is historically seen as unforgiving, mechanical, practical. I've softened the edges of the shapes and applied all these treatments with intention. I'm attempting to challenge the so-called limitations and capacities of steel.

The compositions of my works are defined by their precarious nature. It is a reminder that everything is contingent upon one another, it could all just fall apart. The glue – society – is tenuous and volatile. It is not solid. I'm playing on that idea with the metal itself; typically, it is treated as immovable, forever.

With this work Any way, 2025 there are three layers of repeating forms. Like I’ve cut strips of a piece of A4 paper at random and I’m trying to stick them back together to get the form of the A4 page again. Like I’m trying to fit something back into a recognisable order. A recognised form. But it could go any way, if you know what I mean?

Well, abstract art, there's a freedom in it. There's an openness. For me, defining a work in words, in language, defies the whole point of art. Which is to be visual, and to communicate something in a different language, other than the written or spoken word. It is larger than words. Undefinable through language. That's why abstraction is so important to me. I've always found it hard to communicate what I was thinking, what I was feeling. Using a visual language – drawing, brushstrokes, mark making, textures, layering – all that communicates something that doesn't have to be spoken. It can just be experience.

That's what draws me again and again to making sculpture. That's why I feel like sculpture is important to now. It forces an embodiment. It forces you to be embodied and present in your body, in the moment. And that connection to the physical self, I think, is what I'm interested in and what I think is important.

—Augusta Vinall Richardson