We live in an age when our human and our digital lives are connected in ways unimaginable even just a few years ago. Metadata – the vast, continually accumulated data of how, what and where our digital presence is taking place – is now seen as crucial to others as our blood test results.
Today, our idea of ‘self’ is jarringly brought together as a hybrid of our biological and digital lives. And it is this duality – this digital/human chimera – that Vicki Fanning is continuing to explore in this body of work.
User Generated Content are significant works developed from earlier sculptural ceramic forms, where the artist explored a flowing, organic style in relation to “Mother boards” and morphic earthly bound “users”.
Although ethereal and magical, the materiality of these elegant works is a fairly simple affair; clay, borosilicate glass, and silicon. And yet the sophistication of their construction has been tirelessly and painstakingly tested, retested, broken down, explored and reshaped over hundreds of studio hours. They are literally representations of moving forms in space; encased in fleeting fragments of memory, transitory elements, and fluid ideas.
Glass is now an essential part of the technology we interact with. The infrastructure of superfast broadband, for example, utilises glass fibre to literally transport information in the form, and speed, of light.
