Blow up Tokamak, 2016
stainless steel
700 x 2200 mm (diameter)
Blow up Tokamak is developed from a body of works I loosely refer to as ‘portraits of light’. I devised this series as a corollary to the ‘portraits of mass’ works I had been (and still am) developing that came out of going back to base principles in my work, which depict elemental forces or states of matter, mass was the first. The works were necessarily heavy and ‘massive’ and felt so to work on. I have come to think of them as ‘heavy metal ‘ with all the attendant posturing and drama implied. The inflated looking stainless steel works are the ‘pop’ to those ‘heavy metal’ sculptures and I wanted them to be light and playful and ‘materially honest’ – the stainless used to fabricate this piece is stretched and pressurised into the ‘plastic’ inflated-looking form similar to a child’s flotation ring.Tokamak is a Russian word referring to a torus shaped chamber for containing plasma in a continuous looping fusion reaction.
– David McCracken
