David Spriggs

Funnily enough, both David Spriggs and Nakanishi’s works were shown to me after I made my work. The similarities of ideas that present through form, and the contrasting theory that present through use of subject are pretty extreme. Time and movement in these works are the essential ideas - the illusion and physicality of time and the movement of the viewer in space.


“David Spriggs’s works are wonders in movement. They make you move.” (Erin Manning, Relationscapes: Movement Art, Philosophy p143). The idea that aligns with me is the viewer looking at the form in the plexiglass to try and recognise the object. Putting the viewer into action - having to move around the sculpture in order to find out what it is and to realise its effects. Highlighting the illusion inherent in vision and perception through forcing movement on the viewer.


“The force of Perception”, seeing the plexiglass sheets are the ‘unmaking of perception’ . Allied to Boccioni’s concept of dynamic form, David Sprigg’s animate sculptures seem to create force lines for the emergence of perception. The Image composes itself through the force of a relational dynamic. All Vision works this way…. Stability is vision’s illusion. This paradoxical relation between the abstract and the concrete, between the virtual and the material, between the perceptible and the imperceptible, is at stake in each of Sprigg’s animate sculptures…. inviting us to move-with. (Manning)

Plastic dynamism is not simply how we see an object, but also how an object appears for our embodied perception.  “Plastic dynamism is the simultaneous action of the motion characteristic of an object (its absolute motion), mixed with the transformation which the object undergoes in relation to its mobile and immobile environment (its relative motion).” (Boccioni 1970a, 92)

So, perception is an illusion and everything that we see through our eyes isn’t what we see. Our brains are just reading into the vision signals that it receives. Contemplating  these mechanics and techniques that happen inside your brain and experience, and the mimicry of this in inventions like cinema, or the power of technology to use the illusory capabilities of the brain and the functioning of the body.