Ball with Wheel and The Archive
by Tom Dale
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Opposing themes and conflicting interests have always been the raw materials of my practice. I delight in utilizing this tension to make my work communicate something more than the sum of its parts. For me, one plus one equals three.
The objects I produce have a sense of something absent and incomplete, a kind of vacuum underpinned by melancholia. Ball with Wheel (2006), an object that at first amuses only to then frustrate because its supposed function is not apparent or discernible, is typical of how I like to draw in viewers. The attempt to articulate an irreducible (in the case of Ball with Wheel, a definition for something without one) interests me most. In The Archive (2006), a giant wedge is stuck in a door that both invites and excludes the viewer. How do we make things fit together? The paradox of archiving is that in order to include, we must exclude, whether to get past the wedge or to form our own ideas by regarding and disregarding what we know of the world around us.
Tom Dale, London, U.K. E-mail: om@daletom.com
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