Christopher Miles Studio

Brief Statement

Christopher Miles 

Notes on My Practice:

Essential, Operational

brief

October 12, 2022

I am interested in notions of objects of desire, curios or objects of curiosity, and objets d’art, and how the pleasure in looking, intimacy, and scrutiny associated with such notions might be triggered, heightened, and complicated by an object made by one person to be beheld by others.

My recent sculptures are intended to stress (as in emphasize or enhance, and as in agitate or push) complexities of and relationships between external form, interior space, and surface.

I am an artist who has worked and continues to work in multiple intersections of media, genre, tradition, process, method, and approach. Lately, these intersections tend to involve, among other things, materials including clay and other ceramic media, metals, paints, polymers and resins, fabrics, papers, and methods and concerns related to sculpture, pottery, painting, and drawing.

I am less inclined to speculate as to what my work is about, which I think leads to a reduction or abbreviation of the work, than to comment frankly on how I understand who I am in relation to my practice, the drives behind the work, and the nature of the practice as it evolves over time.

This statement focuses on the two key aspects of my practice, which I refer to as the essential, and the operational.

Essential

These are things so essential to how I think and work, and to the work I make, that if they’re not with me in the studio and in the finished product, then it isn’t me, and it isn’t my work. These are things I might call tendencies, inclinations, dispositions, propensities, predispositions, predilections, bents, drives, obsessions, and maybe afflictions.

·     A craving for intimacy and a propensity for scrutiny with regard to objects, shared with others, and hopefully stirred within others, via the creation and presentation of objects.

·     A hankering to explore and exploit all of the opportunities that are afforded me as an artist and a person by three-dimensional form and space.

·     A wish to have and to give the rewards of peripatetic engagement and kinaesthetic awareness.

·     An aspiration to convey the tactility I have known while making the work by touch to viewers who can only know it by sight, to register and trigger haptic traces via optical experience.

·     An insatiable curiosity about things—all kinds of things.

·     A tinkering itch that must be scratched.

·     An undying fascination with the potentials, tolerances, and limitations of materials.

·     A drive to make things that are present and compelling, perhaps unforgettable, yet unknowable.

·     A predelection for slippage and slipperiness regarding representation and referentiality, complexity and contradiction, and a promiscuity of association.

·     A desire to create objects of desire, and a curiosity about objects of curiosity.

·     A predisposition toward forays into the grotesque and the abject, sometimes the monstrous.

·     A tendency toward bodily suggestion and presence.

·     A mostly unabashed attraction to beauty and a conflicted connection with classicism.

·     An inclination toward pushing my own comfort levels and trying to make things that I’ll have to come to terms with as I’m making them and after they’re completed.

·     A need to participate in the discourse/field and a resolve to offer something fresh.

·     An inevitability of working through stuff that I don’t necessarily understand, and even if I do, maybe I don’t want to talk about it.

Operational

These are things that as of late, and in some cases for long stints, have been on mind, and that I’m trying to work through in in the studio. Most or all of these are at play in varying degrees whenever I’m working in the studio, and any of these, or any combination, might provide impetus for a work, with the others then coming along for the ride.

·   Thinking about and wanting to work through specific types of form or formal problems.

·   Experimenting with specific ways of building or technical problems.

·   Employing new tools or modifying working conditions.

·   Examining ever-evolving material concerns and curiosities.

·   Pushing materials to their limits and seeing if I can get them to do what they don’t do easily or what they aren’t expected to do.

·   Considering qualities or approaches I’ve observed in the work of other artists that inspire or challenge me to work through them in my own way.

·   Complicating the relationship between interior and exterior.

·   Affording experiences of deep space and spatial complexity within small(ish) forms.

·   Establishing a presumption of portability regarding the object.

·   Working through stuff on my mind that I specifically want to evoke, suggest, imply, allude to, or maybe even abstract/represent, but that might be present only in traces by the time the work is completed. This is as close to considering matters of aboutness as I usually get.