All corners of a hexagon are obtuse as in a honeycomb. Therefore a pattern more natural to human movement is the result. Interiors have more reflex. Therefore more repose.
I keep returning to this Frank Lloyd Wright quote from a text on his 1937 Honeycomb House, as my recent studio practice has been guided by a kind of search, within the architectures of E14, for 120º angles. The church I mentioned in my first post, which I walk past each day on my way home, has six large hexagonal windows. It was built in 1964, eight years after construction began on the Locksley Estate, but I haven’t been able to discover who the architect was. To me, the windows seem carefully oriented (NE-SW) to allow sunlight to travel right through the building – and occasionally, on summer evenings when the light falls at a certain angle, you can catch a glimpse of this happening. But most of the time, high-rise flats, which surround and quite literally overshadow the little church, prevent any sunlight from entering at all.
I have been using two collage techniques to explore this dialogue between architectures past and present: 1, cutting and pasting Risograph and photographic prints and 2, overlaying 35mm slide projections to optically merge aspects of the different buildings.
I have also been exploring ways of using real honeycomb in my projection experiments, pressing slivers of cells between clear 35mm leader to create quasi-scientific projection images. I've been using a craft knife to dissect the combs, which deforms their fragile structure and highlights the clumsiness of my comparatively giant hands. Although this does seem apposite, I would like to find a better way of extracting the wax and revealing its very beautiful forms.
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In his current exhibition at White Cube, Kris Martin is showing eighteen lost-wax casts of discarded honeycomb frames. Shrouded in a stone-white residue with glimmers of bronze shining through, the objects are tomb-like; monumental yet understated, delicate, fragile. Each frame is different – those that were cast full give little away, the structure of the cells sealed (concealed) within the bronze but those that were cast empty reveal and perfectly preserve the bees' intricate hexagonal construction.
***
In his current exhibition at White Cube, Kris Martin is showing eighteen lost-wax casts of discarded honeycomb frames. Shrouded in a stone-white residue with glimmers of bronze shining through, the objects are tomb-like; monumental yet understated, delicate, fragile. Each frame is different – those that were cast full give little away, the structure of the cells sealed (concealed) within the bronze but those that were cast empty reveal and perfectly preserve the bees' intricate hexagonal construction.