Artworks

Andrew Sabin

I work backwards with a palette of materials that allows me to build in reverse. I don't get to see what I've made until the very end, an extension of the sculptor's maxim 'how do I know what I think until I see what I've made'. I've always enjoyed permeable surfaces that give a sense of interior life (when you cut through a bronze the interior is profoundly disappointing - all the information is on the outside). When you look inot my sculptures, I want things to be found, new thoughts to be had.

I realise now that my constant background question is where are we? and most of my works make some attempt to imagine that. Clearly things seem the way they are because we are the way we are. I imagine an earwig is just as happy with the inner face of a tree's bark as sky and the heart wood as ground (or the other way round), as I generally am with the blue above and the earth below. I like thinking about space and different clouds of reality occupying the same space at the same time -everything in everything else, everywhere all the time. Because I like thinking about these notions, I have been looking for materials that let me play with those kinds of ideas.

These days, for me, it's all about hydrogenated oils (variations on the theme of margarine). It sounds absurd but I am so excited about it. Although the sculpture I have made for Fulmer seems to be made of concrete and steel, it was built in pastry marge, an industrial  material designed to be ultra-plastic for lamination beytween skins of dough in the creation of puff patry (spaces being opened between the layers through the baking process). Compared to clay this marge is a third of the weight, it never shrinks or dries out, it's always tacky and malleable and it stays put, it can be washed away from a surface without leaving a trace and it was be used again and again without degrading. Perhaps that doesn't sound much, but to me it opens doors like no other material.