Will Cruickshank

Will Cruickshank (b. 1974) has a sculpture practice grounded in the interplay between the shifting roles of material, machine, and maker.  Each component takes its turn in leading or resisting outcomes, and it is a sensitivity to this dynamic push and pull that informs his work.

Working with a collection of improvised, self-built machines and contraptions, he manipulates textiles, plaster, wood, and paint.  Key constructive principles are the use of incrementally adjusted repetitive actions to build surface and volume over long durations, alongside acts of erosion, slicing open, or blasting away, to expose unpredictable material histories.  A philosophy of attendance and improvisation sustains his holistic approach, where intention balances with chance, and all aspects of the process are significant, including waste.  Thread offcuts, sawdust, and accidents create new works with contradictory surface dualities – both soft and hard, yielding yet rigid – and as the residue of one form becomes the source of another, familial networks of shared colour and material grow between objects.

The meditative nature of this methodology speaks to a deeper personal search for belonging and purpose, where ritual and repetition extend beyond the visual, resonating with trauma, debilitating OCD, and addiction.  His intuitive building through cumulative acts, and revealing of embedded pasts, echoes a deeper, unknowable aspect of experience and recollection, making each moment of addition and discovery a pivotal point of narrative within the work.  It mirrors a psychological journey, where events and forgotten histories are brought to light, alongside a private search to understand how personal meaning and understanding intertwine with creative practice.  His exhibitions evoke a sense of the sacred, and act as paused meditative landscapes, where material and process converge with the ideas of memory, relationships, worship, and transformation that underpin his work.