LUCIEN ANDERSON / A Million Tinkered Solutions, 2021
PRESENTING THE EKO 8 ART PROJECTS
LUCIEN ANDERSON /A Million Tinkered Solutions, 2021
mixed media installation
courtesy of the artist, produced in the framework of the Art & Well-being project with support from the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union
The artist, sculptor, and installation artist Lucien Anderson structured the sculptural assemblage for EKO 8 as a series of layered environments, and potential habitats stacked one on top of the other. Previous works by Anderson include structures that could be used, inhabitable environments, and scaled maquettes indicative of purpose. Working in a range of scales and adopting rudimentary construction methods and materials, his works have a DIY aesthetic and a satisfying economy. Anderson is interested in the phenomenon of tinkering, in amateurism, in "getting good enough" at a thing without needing to master it. This ties in with ideas of everyday resilience, resourcefulness, and self-sufficiency, and in low key, local, or individual problem solving.
An early design for this work for the factory site was a site-specific work of modern machines entirely stopped by plants, with vines, entwined. Anderson's research into orreries, the arrangement of mechanical orbs that convey the cosmos, the rotation of the Earth around the Sun, the Moon, and the other planets.
Previous projects have led to escape vehicles, survival structures, and scientific installations with a fragile authenticity. Using a combination of basic materials and everyday found objects, he develops deployable structures, examining fundamental needs, and notions of everydayness and mobility. For this work Anderson has created an off-kilter arrangement that manifests itself like a three-dimensional Venn diagram of overlapping parts which appear to share a common purpose. The layers of construction move between stacked facades and hidden mechanisms of rotation. For this work Anderson was looking at museum dioramas and displays and models of off-grid sustainability, enclosed artificial ferns, silicone dinosaurs, and a range of painted backgrounds. An installation that is loosely diagrammatic and could also be seen as a teaching aid or as a hybrid instrument of measurement.
Lucien Anderson (b. 1992) lives and works in Newcastle, having trained at Newcastle University, Fine Art; with exhibitions and commissions at Allenheads Contemporary Arts and Cheeseburn Sculpture Projects.
