Minerals & Marquetry

I’d been reading Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, where Calvino recounts a fictional conversation between explorer Marco Polo and the Emperor Kubla Khan. Polo describes a series of imaginary/fabulous cities supposedly at the outer reaches of Khan’s empire. It drew me to the possibility that my lenticulars could be, not quite cities, but architectural somehow – like brutalist buildings. I’ve got a collection of 3D geometry books that reflect an interest in structures, some of them crystalline, so I alighted on the idea of photographing crystals, rocks and minerals, playing with scale etc. My work has always been an attempt to marry many influences together. I’ve become interested in attempting to capture the change in colour and shift in highlights as you move your head from left to right, echoing the shift of the camera when shooting the images. You usually try to make sure the lighting in the left images matches the one in the right.

Marquetry/Lenticulars

The laser-cut marquetry/lenticular constructions below were exhibited as part of Must/Have, a group exhibition at Theodore:Art in Nov/Dec 2017.

Influenced by the early novels of JG Ballard, these marquetry/lenticular works play with two different forms of representation. Beneath the laser-cut holes in the marquetry panels, with their picturesque vistas, the 3d lenticular images of crystals seem to grow, as though another world, one with ambivalent scale, is being revealed.