I have yet to call TR Weston for a price on stainless steel, or about outsourcing my work but I have been reflecting a lot about how this would take away from the process of me making, and how I feel about this.
I feel somewhat entirely disconnected with the work if someone else was to shape my design, and I suppose that artists like Koons, Hirst and Murakami must have also felt this within their career. This de-personalisaiton is a part of this commercial art that I feel I need to experience in order to comment on commercialisation of art.
Designs for Stainless Steel:
Can you design a process based artwork?
Is outsourcing a complete juxtaposition of the materiality/ process of the piece?
Through designing I realised, you can't really design a process based piece of work, that has to be moulded randomly and it's more like a conversation between maker and metal. I have a rough idea of where I want the curves and lines and folds to be on the piece of metal when I work with it, but the outcome will always be different each time.
Perhaps it would be easier to produce a mould that could be reproduced and then stainless steel could be cast from it?
Further research:
- Ask technicians if I can some how create a mould for stainless steel.
- Ask fabricators if I can create this mould, then they fill it with stainless steel and make a cast from it for me? This would feel like more of a connection with the work.
- The mould could be the piece of aluminium I have already created?
Developments & Further Work:
As a result of this panic about the disconnection with my own work if I chose to out-source, I bought a sample of stainless steel sheet metal from eBay, 200mm x 300mm and hope to find some way of working with it in one of the workshops, although Ann Povey advised against this idea because the university didn't have the facilities.
The video below shows how to bend stainless steel using strong power-tools and I'm hoping there will be some way of working with it.
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