Paul SELWOOD, Turbulence 2004

Turbulence started as an idea to model the sky. To try and turn the sky into an object. To identify vectors and work ‘infinite’ space into a closed system. For this, I thought to make a sculpture in which interior spaces merge and change. I wanted the sculpture to be high and complex so that it never repeats itself as the viewer moves around it. This would actively encourage the movement of the viewer around and back and forth in order to perceive the relationship of parts and the structures that hold them. The time taken for this active reading of the sculpture also becomes an ingredient in the perceived unity, as a space–time continuum, like the time taken to read and understand a poem.

‘Shaped planes’ in space are perceived as other than what we know them to be. When they are looked at from angles other than at ninety degrees to the viewer, circles become ellipses, squares become rhomboid. The shapes of ‘spaces’ created by shape planes that are not at ninety degrees to the viewer, transform in an even more complex way; as the viewer moves the voids appear to expand or contract. The spaces also assume the colour and tone of the enveloping shapes with variation according to the available light.

The above subtleties animate the architecture of the still form in which seven arcs, constructed from different centres, intersect one another.

Making the sculpture involved juxtaposing shaped elements with intangible spaces, sensing geometric structure, scale, the force of gravity and directing the process towards an entity, an object of vitality that makes you feel something.

When the sky became an object, the viewers’ position was on the horizon.

Photography: Diane Larter