Ian Dawson: Rubble Core

New Art Projects presents a solo exhibition by London-based artist Ian Dawson, featuring monumental sculptures that explore archaeology, reconstruction and material transformation through 3D printing, digital scanning and plastic. About New Art Projects is delighted to present a solo exhibition by London-based artist Ian Dawson. During the last years, Dawson has developed a way to use a 3D printer as an active tool for sculpture making. He observes that he does “not treat the printer as a neutral tool for producing objects designed elsewhere”, rather using “it as a sculptural environment: a place where forms are tested, surfaces are built, decisions are made, and mistakes become part of the work. Instead of sending finished designs to a machine, I sculpt through the printer. The process repeats, pauses, misaligns, colours, deposits and interrupts. I do not clean these actions away. They remain on the surface, showing how each sculpture has come into being”. Ian Dawson has long-standing collaborations and involvement with archaeologists and archaeology. In archaeology, objects are found, recorded, reconstructed, repaired, renamed and moved. This understanding has shaped the way he now works with digital scans. A scan is not just a copy. It is another handling of the object, another event in the life of an object that can inform us not only of its past, but its present and its future. This fascination combines with his long engagement with plastic and plasticity. Observing that “plastic matters to me because it does not stay still. It is heated until it moves, pushed through a nozzle, then left to cool into ridges, seams and bands. It remembers the machine without becoming machine-like. It is a material, but also a way of thinking about change: something that can be reshaped, translated and made to carry the memory of that movement.” In this exhibition, new works take the form of towers. In these pieces, elements have been constructed, sculpted and combined into monumental works that refer back to the human history of totemic creative interventions. Stone 24 is a life-size representation of Stone 24 at Avebury, one of the standing stones within the world’s largest prehistoric henge. Known as the Blacksmith’s Stone, the stone is already a kind of reconstruction: assembled from fragments recovered from a forge and re-erected during Alexander Keiller’s restoration of the monument in the 1930s. Dawson’s piece has the exact same measurements as the Avebury monument, and crucially, it is also an assemblage, cut up and pieced together from images, patterns and textures that he has made and put together. Rather than offering a fixed copy of an original, Dawson “sees the sculpture as one more episode in the stone’s long material history. Between archaeological reconstruction, industrial fabrication and contemporary sculpture, it carries forward a monument that has already passed through repair, displacement, reconstruction and translation” into a new contemporary work of art. All the sculptures in this exhibition remain inside a process of re-making. Forms have passed through cameras, software and printers before becoming objects. Making begins with elements that are already on the move. A scan, a body, an archive image or a mistake are all starting points. The sculptures may stand, but they are not made to settle, as they keep showing us the troubles and transformations that have brought them there. Read more Toggle Prints Sculpture Installation