Nik Ramage

I make sculptural machines that have drifted away from utility and objects that have forgotten their purpose. Some move and others teeter on the edge of movement. They are assembled from found and forgotten objects, scrap and steel and resemble spidery drawings or objects that were nearly invented. Each work might embrace paradox or absurdity and has quirks and ticks built-in and each obeys it’s own logic.

Some of the themes in my work are as follows. Utility and futility: tools and machines are designed for a specific use, to be helpful and labour saving but those that I make are thwarted and suffused with the doubts and maladies of the human condition (tools are after all, a uniquely human occupation but so are these other less useful qualities).

Balance and instability: sculpture often strives for the solid and the stable but can also embrace the soft, the mutable, delicate and fragile. These formal qualities can be suitable manifestations of the ideas in my work. Locomotion is a key property of life and we equate things that move with being alive, so that inanimate things (like sculpture) that move, engage this instinct of ours. It also means they exist in time, along with us.

Website: nikramage.com

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