Interviewer: video.loss
Sean Wadey is an Australian artist whose work challenges traditional notions of perception, culture, and artistic production. Employing ceramics as a predominant medium, familiar icons are interwoven with abstract textures and mirrored glazes implying the juncture between human knowledge and the universe. Through this transfer and subsequent transformation the artist raises questions of fetishism and agency; set amongst the ‘liquodic state’ of contemporary reality.
Wadey’s work is a futuristic interpretation of human influence upon the earth; an attempt at understanding what would be left behind from rapid industrialisation and colonisation. Postmodern artefacts such as chrome ‘Turbo’ automotive badges, car body panels, and alien ceramic glazes are some of the means he uses to explore this concept.
Sean Wadey [IG:seanceramic] has joined #CO
<CO>
Where did you grow up and where are you based now?
<SEAN>
I grew up about an hour North of Sydney CBD on Sydney’s Northern Beaches – National Park on one side and seemingly endless beaches on the other. Currently based in King Cross, Sydney.
<CO>
How do you feel these environments have influenced your art?
<SEAN>
I think that the contrast of lived environments led me down a path of dialectical engagement with materials and concepts. I still work out of a garage studio which backs on to the National Park frequently visited by snakes and other animals, serenaded by the sweet sounds of drift racers that love the isolated, windy roads.
<CO>
What inspires the concepts seen in your work?
<SEAN>
The everyday world and attempting to understand it. I feel like understanding arises at a juncture of what we think we know and speculation.
Primarily, I’m dealing with concepts associated with entropy, post-anthropocene. That is to say, I make art that speculates about the future of earth’s natural processes beyond human existence. How would that evolve and what would that look like?
More recently, incorporating materials and iconography associated with motor vehicles. Historically, ‘the car’ is representative of technological evolution. I like to think that in time, as the planet recovers from it’s human plague, these archetypes, a ‘turbo’ badge for example- will come to represent the root cause of our demise as a species.
I love contemporary philosophies like ‘speculative realism’ or ‘Object Oriented Ontology’ which is in short the speculation about the existence of objects outside of human cognition and rational. In more recent works I have developed an obsession with chrome. Chrome seems to transcend materiality – It isn’t static like the object it rests upon and is constantly in flux with the world. On an even slightly textured surface it reflects a distorted image of the world. It is at once a slick novelty yet deadly serious and sterile. Chrome for me may be an apt metaphor for a techno-organic hybrid. The Terminator was chrome.
<CO>
You often use tools uncommon to traditional fine art (industrial spray painting equipment, 3D printing etc.) why do you utilise these mediums within your practice?
<SEAN>
I think about mechanical and automated tools as a kind of mediator between technology and nature. These processes allow for a certain disconnection from human subjectivity and open up elements of chance to play out.
The airbrush was a graphic design tool used in the days before computers. Graphic design tools like Photoshop essentially simulate what can be achieved with a pair of scissors and an airbrush. In that sense the airbrushed aesthetic is now associated with the ‘digital world’, with technology. Although, humans were spraying pigment from they mouths 45,000 years ago to stencil their hands on cave wall.
I have for the last year, specifically been working with clay. I was lucky enough to learn ceramic hand-building techniques from my late wife Matilda. Seeing her create beautiful objects by hand with industrial like glazed surfaces fascinated me. Clay is earthly and raw and with the simple application of glaze and 1100 degrees Celsius of heat is transformed in to something otherworldly. Working with clay has been a cathartic experience and has 100% made me feel closer to her since her untimely passing in January 2020. Parallel to my own works I have been making a series of slip cast ceramic editions of some of Matilda’s last works, which I hope to eventually share. I am planning a return to painting in 2021. I want to make some oil paintings like a nostalgic cyborg. Maybe even representational paintings like still lives or something, chuck a few flowers in there. Trying to stay relevant with some easel painting – Skills are like Pokemon.
<CO>
A recurring theme with our visual artist interviews explores how early influences of technology, entertainment and the internet subconsciously present themselves in the work we create - What would you say some of these influences have been for you?
<SEAN>
I grew up until my early teens without the internet literally be cause it didn’t exist yet. My compulsion to make things I have thought about as a kind of therapy to a trauma associated to that rift between pre and post internet world and at a time when my brain was still developing. It’s hard to avoid technology as a subject when dealing with a hypothetical narrative of the future. Science fiction of the past has appropriately predicted the present so it is completely rational to think that contemporary sci-fi could be an accurate prophecy.
<CO>
Can you expand on some of the concepts behind your 2020 installment for Lilac City Studio - “All that you can call your own, you can say that you are”?
<SEAN>
The exhibition was Curated by my good friend and Lilac City co founder Sienna White and from memory was, based around a kind of fucked up notion of domestic subjectivity. Each artist work made up a kind of family unit and I think I was the “naughty son”-ish one. My works for the show utilised found car body parts that I assisted and altered to reflect a future where technology, nature and pop culture had hybridized to create some fucked up idol. I had two works in the exhibition; the first titled “I stay High (motherfucker) was a smaller piece of plastic car bumper, airbrushed with neon green skulls and flames and randomly covered with chrome-glazed ceramic blobs. The second, titled “in time this can only result in pain” was a larger floor sculpture consisting of the plastic front end bumper of a car, covered in terracotta clay slip and with a neon light fitting recessed underneath. The sloppy wet clay mud was applied a day before the exhibition opened and for the duration of the show would crack and fall off as it dried while the neon under glow cast neon purple light out on to the floor and interacted with the chunks of dried mud that had cracked and fallen off.
<CO>
How do you think the internet affects the way we interact with art?
<SEAN>
I think the mass proliferation of images on the internet emphasizes the importants of the physical exhibition, of physical things, of the art object. You could argue some Baudrillard Matrix type shit that the simulation becomes the reality but I don’t think we are quite there yet or ever will be. The internet somehow both validates and invalidates things physically, socially and economically. Data’s physical presence is like a distorted reflection of reality in chrome. Not Google Chrome. Chromium, number 24 on the periodic table of elements. It presents a transformed reality, a virtual one. The internet is the predominant abstract thing of our time and should be treated by art/artists interested in perception accordingly. I wonder what objects think about the internet?
Sean Wadey [IG:seanceramic] has left #CO
Images courtesy of Document Photography and Robin Hearfield
