Will Cruickshank: Way Station

Way Station is a solo exhibition by Will Cruickshank, who creates tactile and often textile-based sculptures that are visually harmonious in form, pattern and colour.  Using repurposed equipment such as cement mixers, bicycles and potter's wheels, his practice harnesses the repeating nature of these machines to sculpt, wrap and turn his materials into forms that are only in part determined by himself.  Material, machine and maker, each take their turn in leading or resisting outcomes and it is a sensitivity to this push and pull that drives the work. 

Echoed within the harmony, order and structure of his minimal forms is the meditative nature of his methodology, that has grown through a  devotional engagement with material and process. His studio is both a site of play and a space to relinquish control, where ritual and repetition are constructive aesthetic principles, and thinking happens only through doing. 

Highly skilled at making and mending, a philosophy for perseverance and resilience sustains Cruickshank’s resourceful approach to creating, where nothing is discarded and there are no loose ends.  His interest in unusual combinations of material means waste often becomes useful, and offcuts, failures, and accidents can be fed back into new pieces. Surfaces are eroded, cut open, or blasted away, to reveal their constituent ingredients, with every finished work providing a new set of questions.

Way Station operates as a reflective pause within this continuously moving and evolving research, and these works operate as much as a group of beginnings, as they do as endings.