The Edge Gallery

Scot Bullick: Tool series

Deep into the digital age I began to miss my manual tools. Some rusting from the neglect, others ready as ever to perform their specific tasks. Waiting patiently to rekindle the team. Tools from other generations, decades past and interests changed. Specific gadgets for a single purpose long since redundant. Replaced or forgotten often doesn’t matter because the results are the same in the end. These kind items of mechanical service have been forgotten. Sometimes the knowledge is encased in the previous generation and time removes it from our everyday. Other items are completely redundant, their use no longer required. The issue they once solved no longer a collective concern.

So with some strength in numbers these dismissed relics are teaming up to ease the burden of imposed retirement. They come back as the new order of desire fulfillment. The complete analog deal.  Multi-purposed for total user satisfaction. No post digital issue too complex for this toolset.  Ready-mades need not mourn. Multifaceted bling join in.

Cheap crap beware, your distant relative from the foundry has broken out and is coming for you.

Joan Dunkley:  Remnants

My inspiration often comes from the wonder and amazement I experience in paying close attention to the intriguing shapes, patterns, and colors offered by natural and found or cast-off materials. These cast-offs become my art materials. I have a strong interest in designing and repurposing the remnants into unique, and sometimes quirky, sometimes museful forms.

Motivational ideas behind the work include my particular interest in how tools and other cultural materials reveal much about human-land relationships across time. I like to reflect on the stories, history and mystery in each found remnant, also on the reality that all human-made materials come from the land. And on our current cultural way of deeming things old, useless, used up, and moving on to the new.

For me these natural, found, and cast-off materials are ever fascinating, and offering puzzles to solve.  My process for each art work is like the to and fro of a conversation between myself and the parameters of the materials. Within this interplay my pieces arise, taking me, and potentially the viewer, into an experience of new contexts and forms.