Illumination Series
The Illumination Series is a collaboration between Walton Arts Center and Creative Community Center. The partnership's mission is to highlight practicing Arkansas affiliated artists and the Creative Community Center's engagement in visual arts while spotlighting large scale visual art that responds to the site and speaks to an architectural scale.
Exhibition
Vincent Edwards
LOCATION: Walker Atrium at Walton Arts Center
ARTIST'S STATEMENT :
My body of work embraces the functional aesthetics of architecture in both natural structures and the designed world. When applied carefully, engineering elements and naturally occurring patterns service the decorative aesthetic. I look to wooden boat and aircraft forms, mathematical surfaces, and biological structures as primary sources of inspiration.
The advent of digital design and fabrication tools allow for a vastly expanded artistic vocabulary. Complex curves and surfaces can now be created and manipulated with a staggering level of accuracy and repeatability. Larger, more intricate pieces can be created in a fraction of the time it once took craftsmen working with traditional tools.
Technology is inherently collaborative and inter-disciplinary. Interactions with materials and tools reflect a dense history of design and intention, and increasingly complex technologies add layers to the creative process. Collaborations with Mathematicians, Architects, and Engineers play a critical role in my current art + design practice.
Emerging technologies can both enhance and threaten traditional craft. Handmade art (through the directness of imperfect human touch) retains an honesty and vibrancy that no machine can duplicate. I seek a synthesis of my traditional furniture-making background with my more recent training in digital design and fabrication. I strive for a harmony between these categorically different modalities, where digital design expands traditional design, rather than eclipsing or replacing it.