Sculpture in a Spin: Surfaces in Deformation in Mat Collishaw’s The Centrifugal Soul

Abstract

In The Centrifugal Soul, Mat Collishaw utilises the principles of the zoetrope to create a sculpture where birds and plants appear as ghostly forms suspended outside of the sculpture’s tangible base. The technique of the zoetrope allows for the temporal aspects of a 3D-printed topology to transform perceptions of movement from space to space and from form to form as well as to choreograph an overall composition of space and the dance of display. The intersection of the material arts with optical and natural sciences encourages a sophisticated choreography of viewer perceptions that calls not only on what viewers can see but also what they cannot. My interest is to draw upon some of the conceptual and aesthetic possibilities implied by such choreographic promise in the act of perceiving sculpture. The Centrifugal Soul demonstrates a concern with surface as a site of emergence, or potentially sculpture as a site of emergence for new intensities, expanding and thickening the limits of what we can understand as surface or substance. The behaviour of these surfaces in deformation highlights imaginative possibilities for sculpture to unpack the ephemeral and fluid, including where sculpture might become a technological mediation of vision. I conclude that Collishaw choreographs the intervallic nature of image processes and technologies, and the concepts of motion, time, light and darkness potentially to shift our understanding of the identity of sculpture from an ontological foundation to an epistemological one.