Cassandra Hard Lawrie

Cassandra Hard Lawrie
Nature and her Ape, Art
llaminated cardboard, wood, wrapertoire, 230 x 100 x 100cm
courtesy of Robin Gibson Gallery

My practice as an artist encompasses the disciplines of sculpture, drawing and computer generated imagery. As a sculptor I am focussed on methodologies that are informed by woodworking and boat building. Conceptually, I am attracted to subjects that reflect the invisible and other-worldliness. I mean this in a philosophic and academic sense.

Origins (4), 2006
timber, MDF, resin, paper mache, pigment and found objects
500 x 500 x 500 mm

“The invisible is spatially distant, not only beyond the horizon but also very high or very low. It is also temporally distant, either in the past or in the future. In addition, it is beyond all physical space and every expanse or else in a space structured totally differently. It is situated in a time of its own, or outside any passing of time, in eternity itself. It can sometimes have a corporeity or materiality other than that of the elements of the visible world, and sometimes be a sort of pure anti–materiality. At times it will be an autonomy vis-à-vis certain or even all the restrictions placed on the visible world, at others it will be an obeying of laws different to our own. Even so, these are, of course, merely empty compartments capable of containing the most diverse of beings, from ancestors and gods to the dead and to people different to ourselves, as wells as events and circumstances.” Krystof Pomia

Cultural and Social frameworks, History, Philosophy and Psychology are the background themes of my art practice. For me, they represent the invisible in the sense they may be non-tempocentric or defiant of singular interpretation. They all exist beyond material reality. I have often chosen to produce sculptural objects that aim to appear as fake artefacts or theatre props rather than an art object. I see the Museum and the Theatre as compelling messengers of history, sociology and psychology—and the artefact and the prop as signals from the messenger.