Colin Wright - Fine Artist
Recent Works 2012 to 2014
The desire to get to the essence of who and why we are, and what that means, is a very human endeavour, mapped through our collective histories. I am fascinated by evolutionary theories which attempt to make sense of this endeavour by establishing the formative start-points of our preoccupation with such things. I am particularly interested in the beginnings of conscious thought, the role of art and storytelling in this, counting and subsequently mathematics as a manifestation of memory, environmental adaptability and navigation and ultimately survival.
Episodic memory may well have been the single most important psychological evolution in our species which enabled our developing consciousness of place and time to be employed as an accelerant from mere survival to the expressing and understanding of the world in which we live.
Conscious thought gives rise to speculation, hypothesis, exploration and a contemporaneous understanding of the world we live in. Art and mathematics are manifestations of this, as are science and religion. Descartes described self-consciousness as the shared structures of our subjective consciousness which are the ‘conditions of possibility’ of objective knowledge which gives us the motivation to create and ponder and ‘prove or disprove’ – to ‘think’ therefore to exist. The Platonian idea of aesthetics – beauty and order described through the natural world, philosophy and mathematics offers an aesthetic which is more subjective. Interestingly, a study this year at UCL by Semir Zeki, observed that people who appreciate the beauty of mathematics activate the same part of their brain as others do when looking at art or listening to music, suggesting a neurological basis to beauty.
I am drawn to the philosophical and aesthetic properties of mathematics for this reason. My initial explorations of the relationship between art and mathematics were based in geometry which in part was fuelled by my research into Plato and his writings on beauty, aesthetics and mathematical symmetry. Euclidean symmetry is invariant, in that transformations were continuous, whereas Plato’s Diamond Theory rejects this for variant and asymmetrical transformations. When coupling symmetrical variation with the notion that the artistic process is algorithmic, a structure and motivation for this body of work exists.
This body of work represents a period of two years of my practice. The work has slowly evolved in this time from the paradoxical applications of our collective intelligences for very positive reasons next to those, which will quite simply bring about our own destruction into work which is self-referential - of and for itself. The nuclear submarine became a potent symbol for me of this paradox where the pinnacle of our thinking symbolised in the craft was being put to use for self preservation via deterrence yet by doing so placing ourselves in the most perilous and most catastrophically disastrous scenarios.
The most current work is a combination of several elements; algorithmic processes, variant symmetry, geometry, cryptography and an examination of art itself. This is achieved through an interrogation of systems and structures, geometric variances, grid dissections, quantum symbolism (that submarine is still there) and scale. The formal relationships of composition, colour and shape are explored through both traditional and non-traditional processes. Mathematical relationships or numerical juxtapositions are present next to an algorithmic process which takes over and predetermination is replaced by aesthetic juxtaposition.
The most recent of this body of work are meant to suggest that they could be from another era which is a reverential nod to their history. In part, the visual artifice that art and mathematics has offered in its legacy forms the basis of some of the interrogations on this site. Artists such as Ellsworth Kelly, Jean Arp, Francois Morellet and Herman de Vries lend much to the aesthetic experience of this body of work. The lines which enable the dissections or delineations to take place are left evident to visualise the process of thinking and ‘working things out’, the surfaces have the brush marks evident to illustrate that this is a manual process and the edges are drawn to add drama and a human quality to the juxtapositions.
My work fuses my fascination with the natural world and our relationship with it through mythology, history, philosophy and aesthetics. I have worked in and with the landscape as both subject and material for over 30 years now in various media, drawing, sculpture, painting, photography and more recently video works. My work has become more allegorical and reflective in parallel with my own ageing.