Almut Grypstra, 2008

 
I construct machines and build objects that react to situations.
The drive behind my art work is the try to picture my surroundings to myself. I focus my attention onto inconspicuous or strange characteristics of a room or a material. My perception selects very subjectively to important and non important impressions. I want to break open the hierarchic divisions in important and not significant information by putting the trivialities in the center. After that I look for possibilities to transfer these impressions by looking for unusual connections. So at the beginning of my work process is the discovery of the already given. I watch and research in this way the given situations of a room  or also the already existing marks  and characteristics of a certain material.

I record my observations in drawings. For me the drawing gives the opportunity to perceive the non-obvious better. When I map a place or draw a room I discover trivialities that stay hidden under first impression. It is these trivialities that interest me. From the discoveries I make in the drawings ideas for objects and machines evolve.I develop works that react to minor things like a socket or a strange crack in a wall.

An often re-curing element of my work are machines. Motors put elements into movement which seem to gain a life of their own by this. My machines are in direct connection to their surroundings.
Whilst some objects create products that are influenced by their

surroundings or connect with their surroundings to a new whole so other objects are in interrelation with their surrounding room only by their movement that is oriented to their surroundings.

The machines withdraw themselves from the obligation for produtivity. If products are created they stay fleeing in the form of gas and water drops and have no further function than being sculptures. Organic shapes and structures borrowed from nature give a hybrid appearance to some objects. These seem to be hermaphrodites between nature and technic.

Different from the kinetic art of the 20s to the 60s the context in which my work evolves is one of a digitalized world in which hardly any production processes become visible. Machines and workers are replaced by chips which guide through the production. So the perception of the machines  plays  always  also with the moment of surprise and the quotation of an area gone. For me it is not in any way about preference of the past to the present or to conjure up the 'good old times'. For me rather only from the shift of the viewpoint to an area gone a new position evolves which enables the outlook onto the present.

Here also a note from my papers (not revised and not censored, thoughts, which cannot be sorted yet anywhere):

What is a good sculpture? Sculpture that only imitates smooth, organic or tactile shapes from the 50s is very dumb. I do not want to build priest's garden sculptures, do not want to produce completely harmless boring nice shapes. I want to stick with my raw, weird material and creature things that are not only pretty. Breaches are allowed, complications are allowed. I want to get to optic with 'craftworked', but so that it works. I just do not want to again and again repeat. 
Stubbornness is allowed.


introduction: J.L.Schroeder

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all photographs EINSTELLUNGSRAUM e.V.