artist Chris Braddock with his clay works (drawing)

Check this out:          http://vimeo.com/54972329

" Chris Braddock is an artist and academic. He is Associate Professor of visual arts in the School of Art & Design, AUT University, New Zealand, and Chair of the AUT ST Paul St Gallery. His art practice involves performance, video and sculpture. His theoretical research stems from the disciplines of art history, anthropology, and performance studies. Key terms that underscore Braddock’s art and writing: performative sculpture, part-object/ part-sculpture, moulds and casts, material trace, absence and presence of the body, labour of making, modes of participation, performance and its documentation, animism, contagion, art and spirituality, blasphemy."


  

He did a whole series of body works by using clay (epoxy clay) in 2010, like "2 pushing", "3 pushing shoulders", "3 passing" etc. also the show which just finished in April, "the Material Traces: Time and the Gesture".

In his performance, you can see a very strong relationship between arts' body and the object (here is epoxy clay), there involved a lot of actions, like punch, press, knock, break in, squeeze, mould etc. seem like all about body strength to me, he used every parts of human body to deal with one object or we can say the material — clay.

Also there is a thing about him I really like to say, he got his own way document his works, whatever it's a action, a performance or a sculpture, like the "push" (2003), he recorded the performance of his own gestures by a role of sculptures and description with categories.

 "Braddock has developed the standard categories of documentation such as provenance, materials, techniques and contexts resulting in an extraordinarily detailed and obsessive description in line with the project’s overall concerns of self-reflection with a focus on the methodologies of how things are collected as well as what."

According to his works and the way of document, I sensed those extraordinary details are interesting and playful, through the martial find the reflection of self, that is something I'd like to try...







http://www.christopherbraddock.net/about/        CHRISTOPHER BRADDOCK

http://arden.aut.ac.nz/portfolio/chris.braddock      AUT ART+DESIGN

http://www.christopherbraddock.net/artworks/new-work-2003/      PUSH 2003