Friday, February 04, 2011

My watch has stopped too

Is there anyone in New Zealand doing stranger work than Rohan Wealleans? His layer, cut and paste technique has driven him from the unnerving gashed and pinned works of the beginning of this century (love saying that) to the weirdly believable objects that constitute his current focus. 

Creating a convincing object has always been a benchmark for sculptors (not as easy as you would think), but it is a goal that can be easily subverted or at least made even trickier by uncanny surfaces. Surfaces that don't add up as far as the human eye is concerned but just keep on looking weird. Now we discover that maybe Wealleans' surfaces aren’t as strange as we thought but more like spooky echoes of shapes and surfaces hidden from normal vision. 

That’s certainly the impression you get when you visit subblue, Tom Beddard’s blog where his animations of fractals programmed to mimic natural terrain are featured. You can see Beddard’s videos (and possibly a fair rendition of Rohan Weallean’s dreams/nightmares) here.