Sculptor Tom Price on Material Experiments and Meaning.

20 hours ago7 min read1 comments

The stage, in its most profound sense, is not confined to the proscenium arch; it exists wherever a material is asked to speak, to hold a pose, and to convey a story without uttering a single word. This is the realm where sculptor Tom Price operates, a masterful director in a theatre of form and substance where the very stuff of his creations—be it molten aluminum poured over discarded clothing, industrial plastics heated and stretched into sinewy, figurative elegance, or the humble asphalt of our city streets transformed—are the lead actors in a silent, powerful drama.Price’s work is a continuous, breathtaking dialogue between figuration and abstraction, a choreography where the recognizable human form emerges from, and retreats back into, the raw, unmediated language of his chosen mediums. He doesn't merely sculpt a figure; he coaxes it forth from the material's own memory and resistance, much like a playwright discovers a character not by imposing a will upon them, but by listening to their inherent voice.His process is one of radical collaboration with his media, a series of material investigations where the outcome is never entirely pre-ordained, but discovered in the heat of the moment, in the flow of the pour, in the cool, hardening truth of the cast. This is not art as dictation, but art as conversation, a call-and-response between the artist's intent and the material's own physical history and properties.One can look at his series using recycled plastics, where heated polymer is drawn into forms that echo musculature and flowing hair, and see not just a statue, but a narrative about consumption, permanence, and the fragile beauty of the human body itself, all articulated through the visceral, translucent quality of a material we encounter daily and thoughtlessly discard. The meaning is not applied like a veneer; it is intrinsic, baked into the very process, a consequence of the alchemical transformation he orchestrates.It brings to mind the foundational principles of modernist sculpture, of a Brancusi seeking the essential form within the stone, or an Eva Hesse finding profound emotional resonance in latex and fiberglass. Price stands on that venerable stage, but his script is wholly contemporary, dealing with the archaeology of our own material culture. He finds the human in the industrial, the timeless in the transient, and in doing so, his work becomes a poignant soliloquy on our relationship with the physical world—a world we shape, and which, in turn, irrevocably shapes us.

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#Tom Price

#sculpture

#material experimentation

#figuration

#abstraction

#artist interview

#contemporary art

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