Nathan Caldecott

Fracture Technologies, Posture Dynamics, Nathan’s Art Studio

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Nathan Caldecott's work moves between pseudo-minimal sculptures, industrially shredded installations, and algorithmic digital painting. All touch on the process of ‘rendering’, and the awkwardness of digital models in digital and physical spaces.

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He uses SketchUp as his studio, and as a means to over-engineer his sculptural work. One working file normally catalogues work made over a number of months, or years. When he needs a new space, he makes a new room. When he wants to dispose of old work, he deletes. As a functional tool, he uses plug-ins to find the biting points of sculptures, and to pre-program physical installations to millimetre accuracy.

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The ‘studio’ aspect of his work in SketchUp normally forms a latent part of my practice, as he tests out the ideas he wants to make in the physical world. During his residency, he's carved out this ‘studio’ as a work in and of itself, cataloguing the detritus of studio usership in a number of revolving, documented spaces.

 

These evolved with the work underlying them, but also under a guise of continuous improvement, with spaces publically over-engineering themselves in anticipation of some future production, or display. Fracture Technologies and Posture Dynamics – names cynically sourced from Instagram geo-tags – are exercises in creating a utopian digital studio facility, while Nathan’s Art Studio converts a number of previous studio spaces into an integrated building, musing on the potential value of their provenance.  

 

Visually, the models play with the way lines are rendered via a parallel projection X-Ray view, inverting the imagery of the lines as diagrams, and removing a sense of personal co-location. Featuring an un-named sculpture throughout, we are unsure if it is a product of these spaces, or an ornament to them.

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Nathan Caldecott's practice has a focus on digital models, and their statehood in physical spaces. He's interested in the dual functions these models have: the roles they have to play as structural units, and the roles they could play as containers of value. Creating a redirected form of minimalist sculpture, his work creates a distinct distance between these dual functions, using narratives of physical value to intercept and amplify the models' visual systems.