(detail)
Villin
Headpiece
Folding detail (2011).
Longest
object length
11’. Steel,
aircraft.
bringing facets of nature gained through science
into the cultural mainstream. In a way, I feel
my job is to counter our natural tendency of
reductionism and help to reconnect the dots.
My own way of approaching things tends to be
reductionist as well and it is again some sort of
a learning process I feel the urge to share in my
work.
The human (and by extension the human
figure) has always been at the center of my
interest, when I was painting as well as later
in sculpture. And it was a great source of
frustration when I was in physics that it felt so
removed from the human being. When I make
my protein-based pieces, the human figure
is almost always part of it, sometimes more,
sometimes less hidden. To give you an example,
my sculpture based on the protein Microcin
J25 (called “Nanos”) used to be displayed
horizontally (and was called differently) but
I ended up putting it vertically because that
structure has a loop at one end which resembles
a head in that orientation. It is interesting to
me to keep exploring different approaches
because I feel that they feed off each other
10
in constructive ways. It reminds me of the
German painter Gerhard Richter, who has been
painting abstract and realistic simultaneously
for pretty much his whole career. In fact, the
two big commissions I’m working on right now
are examples of each approach; one consists
of two human figures in a dialogue, whereas
the other one is based on the structure of the
collagen molecule — the most abundant protein
in the human body.
Q: How did you come to work in steel as your
main material?
A: I have always had a strong affinity for steel.
But the main reason is that I need a material
that can do structurally extreme things, while
being suitable for the outdoors. Because steel is
very strong and easily available, it can be easily
manipulated with available industrial tools, and
is a wonderful medium. Most of the time I use
stainless steel. The drawback is that it feels
quite cold. Patinas are not really an option. For
that reason I’m incorporating more and more
colored glass in my works.
SciArt in America August 2013