David Spriggs

Funnily enough, both David Spriggs and Nakanishi’s works were shown to me after I made my work. The similarities of ideas that present through form, and the contrasting theory that present through use of subject are pretty extreme. Time and movement in these works are the essential ideas - the illusion and physicality of time and the movement of the viewer in space.

“David Spriggs’s works are wonders in movement. They make you move.” (Erin Manning, Relationscapes: Movement Art, Philosophy p143). The idea that aligns with me is the viewer looking at the form in the plexiglass to try and recognise the object. Putting the viewer into action - having to move around the sculpture in order to find out what it is and to realise its effects. Highlighting the illusion inherent in vision and perception through forcing movement on the viewer.

“The force of Perception”, seeing the plexiglass sheets are the ‘unmaking of perception’ . Allied to Boccioni’s concept of dynamic form, David Sprigg’s animate sculptures seem to create force lines for the emergence of perception. The Image composes itself through the force of a relational dynamic. All Vision works this way…. Stability is vision’s illusion. This paradoxical relation between the abstract and the concrete, between the virtual and the material, between the perceptible and the imperceptible, is at stake in each of Sprigg’s animate sculptures…. inviting us to move-with. (Manning)

Plastic dynamism is not simply how we see an object, but also how an object appears for our embodied perception.  “Plastic dynamism is the simultaneous action of the motion characteristic of an object (its absolute motion), mixed with the transformation which the object undergoes in relation to its mobile and immobile environment (its relative motion).” (Boccioni 1970a, 92)

So, perception is an illusion and everything that we see through our eyes isn’t what we see. Our brains are just reading into the vision signals that it receives. Contemplating  these mechanics and techniques that happen inside your brain and experience, and the mimicry of this in inventions like cinema, or the power of technology to use the illusory capabilities of the brain and the functioning of the body.

VISION II 3D Installation. 2017. 5 x 2 x 5 metres / 16 x 6 x 16 ft. Painted and layered transparent sheets. David Spriggs’ Vision artwork series have a distinct focus on the senses. Accentuated by an affinity between its subject matter and the fragmentary nature of the medium, there is a tension created between form and emptiness. Appearing both as an implosion and as an explosion depending on the one’s perception, the viewer has the sense that he/she is observing a form in becoming, yet at the same time breaking down. The immersive experience created by Vision provides the audience with the impression that they are in the midst of witnessing an event, something of monumental proportions akin to the Big Bang. In changing viewpoints by navigating around the work, Vision is continually altered, breaking down at the sides so that the viewer can only see the edge planes of multiple sheets, begging the question: Is there in fact a form, or just individual images? Reference to the Cubism movement and the associated deconstruction of the conventions of perceptible space is apparent in the work of artist David Spriggs. Vision shares similarities with the early paintings of Picasso and Braque that illustrate relatively solid masses “giving way to a consistent process of composition in which the forms of the objects depicted are fragmented into a large number of small intricately hinged opaque and transparent plates […] that fuse with one another and with the surrounding space” (Analytical Cubism). The manner in which the edges of these planes dissolve, allowing their contents to leak into one another, can be paralleled to the fragmentation of Spriggs’ work that comes together in the eye of the viewer to form the whole. Moreover, just as the Futurist movement was striving to portray speed and forceful dynamism in their art, so too does Spriggs’ Vision capture this impression of an object in dynamism. Boccioni’s Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (1913) is one of the many sculptures the Futurist artist created that conveys human figures in movement using ‘lines of force’, which were intended to convey the directional tendencies of objects through space. Similar to Boccioni’s ‘lines of force’, are the minimal yet precisely-placed dashes of white paint that come together to form Vision and to give a sense of pulsating movement. The viewer is instantly drawn in to the work by these force lines. Fixed simultaneously in both its moment of becoming and breaking down, Vision is at once convex (exploding) and concave (imploding). Forming a half-sphere where the piece appears convex, Vision is reminiscent of the human retina and the mechanics of perception. Even its title lends itself to the experience of the viewer seeing and perceiving. Vision must be experienced in person if one is to gain a full appreciation of the piece. Text by Heidi Schmeiser