Hiroyuki Hamada. #73, 2011-13, painted resin, 46 x 70 x 25 inches
Found Hamada's beautiful work originally in Raw + Material = Art. Found, scavenged and upcycled, 2012 by Tristan Manco, a survey of a wide international range of artists using non-traditional materials.
I used to find scavenged materials really exciting, especially in building: the transfer of dadaist collage to architecture, but after this book I sort of lost a bit of interest. The work often seemed gimmicky: not arte povera so much as art clever clogs. Hamada has quite a few of the pages from this book on his own blog including the Chilean Luise Valdes, whose 'Cocinar', part of Casa de Karton, I quite like as it looks not unlike my own house: small, white, basic, hand finished – it reminds me of the irregular rooms hacked into the cliffs above Alicante which were all nicely tiled. Not that my house is a sculpture, or that Valdes was building a house, but the nature of the surfaces are hand-worked, not the product of a machine or an industrial process. This is increasingly rare to see, the marks of the hand.
Luise Valdes. Casa de Karton, 2008Two ends of a material scale: Hamada's resin finished like ivory with inlays and thin seams of ebony, and Valdes' whitewashed cardboard. One immensely calm, solid and contemplative, the other earnest, fragile and beloved. The Hamada piece above, #73, does not appear in Raw + Material = Art, but is on his website along with a number of prints of this folded shape:
Hiroyuki Hamada. B18-04.
This work is all material and shape and has gone on for years within a very limited formal palette. Valdes is about material and material culture: form is supplied by the everyday world and as such rich and complex and intimate. I like this pairing.