Daniel Mort

Artist statement

Interested in the ambiguous narratives he can create Dan Mort fully utilises scale, abstraction and balance to present highly crafted sculptures toying with multiple, simultaneous, readings. Ranging from the directly depicted to the intentionally obtuse, Mort's objects are like compounds with a long-forgotten use, outlandish yet made up of tantalisingly familiar components, all twisted, contorted and endlessly cryptic.

Mort employs a network of intricately cut and constructed elements and combines these with a delicate use of balance and structure. Maintaining a formal rigour, with an irreverent and playful use of materials, his works oscillate between the exactitudes of minimalism and the ambiguities found in abstraction. Ranging in degrees of complexity, from the simple combination of one or two elements, to a highly layered structure, his works show sculpture committed to the potential formal relationships of parts to a whole. He matches classical, handmade, elements alongside found objects ranging from an ink cartridge to a musical instrument, a wooden egg to a tripod, a plastic cheese to an anvil, which once pieced together do not lend themselves to any particular narrative but more point towards the nature of art as machine, as process, as a catalyst towards a form of understanding.

Mort redesigns the descriptive purpose of objects, turning the viewer's familiar associations with them askew, leaving you in perpetual anticipation of the point of arrival. Figurative elements are used as building blocks in the formal construction of a new and altogether inverted system of meaning. These elements determine the form of the sculpture, so that the sculpture ends up both as a parody of itself and as an embodiment of these narratives and diversions.