City Stills

I recently re-discovered some black and white photos that I took of my City sculpture, not long after I had first completed it. My initial idea for the City was for it to be a set for a small 8mm animated film (but it somehow turned itself inside out and became a tower sculpture instead) so these photos were a sort of tribute to the unborn film – ‘stills from a film that doesn’t exist’, if you like.
Having grown up on a diet of strange little dark animations and movies, I think that my sculptural influences probably owe more to cinematography than they do to offer fields of art. As I’m sure many of you can tell, I was always a big fan of people like the Brothers Quay and of Czech animators such as Jan Švankmajer - and the weird dreamlike worlds that they conjured up probably had a lot to do with the way my delicate little mind developed during those formative years.

John Malkovich & Me ;o)

Snow Angel
Uploaded by angels_in_the_snow

I was pleasantly surprised to receive an email from Sony the other day, telling me that they had commissioned an animation from the script writing competition that I had entered and won. And here it is, 'Snow Angel'.

If you scroll down to the 'Interesting Sites and Blogs' section on the left of the screen and click on 'John Malkovich On-Line Script Project' you can view the original script for the animation. John Malkovich's piece is scene 1 and mine is scene 2.

Untitled Sculptural Component (Crabhead Doll)

Untitled Sculptural Component (Crabhead Doll), originally uploaded by Wayne Chisnall.

This piece should eventually form part of a larger sculptural work. It's one a many small 'works in progress' that I just lump under the heading of Sculptural Components. With them I'm trying to force myself to work in a different way. Instead of starting with a fixed idea of how the sculpture should look and then trying to physically realise that idea (which is my normal way of working), I'm trying to work in a more organic way, without a rigidly fixed idea of the end result. Hopefully the components themselves will start to dictate the structures necessary for their interaction. I'm also interested in creating new works that can be disassembled and re-assembled in a variety of different ways.