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Robert Andrew's Unforgetting

Christine Morrow
Eyeline 91
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Robert Andrew’s art works are orchestral. So long as you imagine an orchestra in which the conductor has a game plan but the performers are independently-minded and even secretly practice a little disobedience. No-one follows the same score.

Many of Andrew’s works feature continuously moving parts: fragments of wood, chalk, stone and shell. Sometimes the works are complex mobile installations that dip, sway and bob. Other times, they are mechanical paintings that make or rework themselves. Usually, the motions are controlled by an electronic system that adapts open-source Arduino programming technology.

Systems Theory states that a master plan—no matter how much it tries to foresee and control its output through modelling, risk assessments and contingency measures—is only a blueprint. Try feeding an algorithm into a network of pendulums whose shapes are organic and asymmetrical. Input pulses of kinetic energy at steady intervals. Then observe the suspended objects performing to their own irregular schedule, one governed by a combination of Hooke’s law, force vectors and torque, tension and gravity, linear momentum, the elastic potential energy of the braided nylon fishing line, and the uneven weight distributions of the objects it suspends. Do not forget to factor in fluctuations in temperature and the gentle air currents generated by human bodies moving through the exhibition space. Then stand back and watch the quirks work their way through the system like kinks rippling themselves loose.

Of the forces that Robert Andrew’s art work brings into play, the ones that matter most are friction and resistance. He titled his most recent exhibition An Unforgetting (2018). Why choose this word, with its hint of a double-negative, and its suggestion of retrieval and reversal? At the very... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline

Data Stratification - (re)scribing language, 2018.

Data Stratification - (re)scribing language, 2018. Detail of suspended components against wall: stone and oxide and binder on burnt wood, time-based, kinetic work, dimensions variable.
Photograph Robert Andrew. Courtesy the artist.

Data Stratification - (re)scribing language, 2018.

Data Stratification - (re)scribing language, 2018. Detail of burnt wood and stone, time-based, kinetic work, dimensions variable. Photograph Robert Andrew. Courtesy the artist.