Over the next week we will be welcoming all the artitsts who will be participating in the USUK Cast Iron Symposium here at SSW.
Already with us are Austin Sheppard and Jeff Crawford from the US, as well as our new technical placement Nam Le, who has just joined us after working on the US portion of the symposium at Salem Art Works in NY, USA.
Still to come are Kevin Dart, Geoff Hockley, Kelly Ludeking, Susanne Roewer, Kelly Wilton and Ben Woodeson and USUK director Coral Lambert.
Geoff Hockley is from Llandysul in the UK, who works primarily with forms influenced by the processes of scientific inquiry and engineering. Based upon the flow and movement of natural structures, his work is a study of the ephemeral nature of change, conveyed through the use of primordial materials such as wood, glass, stone, iron and bronze.
Kelly Wilton is from Temple, Arizona. Her work deals with natural forms, creating replicas of biomorphic structures through recycling man-made objects, as an allusion to transformation as a cyclical process, bridging themes of growth and decay.
Austin Sheppard is from Greenville in North Carolina. He tackles themes of confinement and release in his figurative work. Sculpted out of a mixture of carved wood, fiberglass, steel and cast iron, his work broaches the human condition in relation to both our built environs and the metaphysical boundaries and restrictions we impose upon ourselves.
Ben Woodeson is an installation artist working in East London, UK. He creates minimalist spatial abstractions, which cause tension in relation to the way viewers navigate and interact with the installations. The psychological effect of his work becomes the main point of focus, an experiment involving subtle manipulation of the balance between comfort and entropy.
Kevin Dart is both an artist and mechanical engineer based in Rochester, NY. Since completing his Masters in Mechanical Engineering, the training he received in that particular area is heavily reflected in his artistic practice. His focus on iron casting is centered around its associations to our industrial environments and societal developments.
Jeff Crawford recently graduated from Alfred University, NY. His attraction to creating art works with metal came from its inherent properties and capability to withstand the perils of time. Working on a large scale, Crawford creates immense cast iron sculptures which act as an investigation into his Scottish genealogy. It is a reflection of where the surname Crawford came from, and who the people who have possessed the title throughout history were.
Susanne Roewer is a sculptor coming over from Basel in Switzerland. She studied at the University of the Arts Berlin and graduated as a “Meisterschueler” in sculpture and graphics, after 2 years studying Material Sciences at the Technical College in Freiberg (Miners Academy). She is now represented by Kornfeld gallery in Berlin. Her sculptures play with representational motifs from diverging cultures and combine different materials and techniques. Her painted works are usually overlaid onto hard, tactile materials such as aluminum, steel and stone, bridging areas of fine art painting and sculpture.
Kelly Ludeking has been casting metal since graduating from college in 1997. He completes commissions as well as working on his own artwork and hosting workshops and public iron pours from his farm in Decorah, IA , where he is currently setting up studios for foundry work and fabrication.
Coral Lambert is Associate Professor and Chair of sculpture at Alfred University. Coral is also the Director of the National
In her artwork she endeavors to capture shifts from the ordinary to the extraordinary, placing under the microscope the elusive essence of the metaphysical oscillating between tangible and intangible so they can be experienced. As surrealist poet Paul Eluard eloquently expressed, ‘It is not far as the crow flies from the land of the imagined to the land of the real’.
We look forward to seeing what each artist decides to produce over the course of the symposium – already Austin has begun to make a mock-up for a series of pieces he plans to produce and we are excited to watch the work take shape. We will keep you posted with photos over the next few weeks!
