The
industrial revolution has been the major factor for changing
our human civilisation from mostly an agrarian culture that
depends on natural resources for food and handmade crafts to
manufacturing and machine dominated large-scale production
of goods, utilising new types of materials and advanced forms of
energies and methods that vastly supersedes any previously
deployed modes of manpower.
For better or worse, our world has been profoundly changed
forever, certainly we would never, voluntarily, opt to regress
to a pre 18th century society; but we have to pay the
price.
Pollution and industrial waste are two huge drawbacks of
“modern” life; however, new insights and efforts have been
gathering momentum towards recycling to reduce the negative
impact of the throwaway culture that is drowning us!
Some of
these visionary recyclers are artists who take cast-out
items and reuse them as the building blocks of new creations.
By adding a fresh dimension to something that is no longer
needed and invariably labelled as discarded junk, he gives it a
new life through the magic touch of art!
Scrap
metal in particular have found favour with many artists
through the twentieth century, with successful few expanding
their vision to create a fusion of machine parts that totally
transcends their intended purpose thus metamorphosing into
something very new and entirely original.
Christopher
Trotter, our Australian artist in review today, is one
of those artists who found success in that vein of sculpture.
Taking
that old Australian concept of “make do” to heart, and
applying it to his artwork that he constructs from discarded
materials, he skilfully transforms all that industrial refuse into
creatures large and small, tame and wild, real and mythical,
creatures that could almost spring to life and become animated,
skipping gingerly into the bush or might jump over to devour you
in a metallic nightmare frenzy of nuts and bolts…
The
website is crammed with these wonderful metallic creatures
and displays quite a vivid imagination combined with the skilful
handling of materials necessary to intermarrying the myriad and
diverse shapes from the different sources of the many disparate
industries from which he sources them.
His
sculptures, also, display a keen eye for detail…that sort of
visual representation must have been a difficult thing to achieve,
keeping in mind that he doesn’t cast any part of the work but
utilises the natural shape of the machine parts as they come.
Good old Aussie humour is quite evident in these works, and
some Australian favourite wildlife are on show here as well.
Christopher’s work has won wide acclaim with several awards
to his name, and many commissioned public works of his are on
display in various public places.
Christopher lives and is successfully practicing his art in
Brisbane, Queensland.
On a technical note, the website is quite novel in design and
makes extensive use of “mouse-overs” and "layers"
techniques
using Java-script code, which seem to be proliferating the world
wide web at the moment, aided by many new and powerful web
design programs such as Dream Weaver.
This, in spite of the
extra dynamism and the different way the contents of a website
interacts with the viewer, is a double edged sword, for to
correctly accomplish the designer’s goal, all various components
have to be preloaded before the page functions as intended.
This adds extra overheads in terms of the time needed to
download any page, in this case, sometimes over 40 items were
needed. If you have a pretty fast connection this shouldn’t be a
great problem though, but many don’t enjoy this luxury.
Couple
of other small gripes as well, I like to mention...
With so much intricate detail in the various works, I would’ve
liked
some more extra close up shots and perhaps from various angles
to appreciate them even more! I would have, also, liked a bit more
text describing and commenting on the many works, how they were
constructed, what went in them, how long did a piece take and
so on ...it all adds to the interaction and helps
getting to know the
artist and his work a bit better.
On the
whole, this is a very enjoyable site, surely worthy of your
inspection and repeated visits...you’ll love it…guaranteed!
Please
visit Christopher Trotter’s website at:
www.trotter.com.au