The winner of the first edition of the Premju Għall-Arti will receive a specially-commissioned work created by artist Kane Cali. Gillian Bartolo interviews the artist about his creative process.
“When I’m done with a piece of art I want to move onto the next because I’m bored with it. It was more enjoyable as an idea than what I made of it.” Later, Kane Cali will say: “There’s a lot of you, especially in sculpture, there’s a lot of you, because it’s a struggle… if the artist doesn’t have to struggle, his art isn’t worth pursuing.”
Kane’s restlessness defines him. As a young man in the UK he moved from 3D character animation to 3D sculpture in ceramics and glass at Farnham University and the prestigious Royal College of Art, exploring the play of light on his digital glass sculptures. He called it “language as wavelengths, as moments of vibration”.
His evocative Ripple Landscapes, described by one admirer as “water frozen in motion”, explored the possibilities of creating objects in a virtual medium (3D modelling) and translating them into tangible objects such as glass.
In 2013, Kane returned to Malta to take up a lecturing post at Mcast, and continue working on his art.
His return saw a shift from 3D modelling to line drawing and prints, while he set up his new studio. He photographed people, scanned them onto his computer and cut them up into blank, featureless ‘building blocks’, prints which he could then manipulate – reconstructing, removing, replacing. “For two years, I literally segmented every bust into parts.”
During the same period, Kane produced a series of line drawings of people which he insists, at first, are quite simply a “sequence of lines, and not a representation of people”, and that one must “look at the underlying structure that is producing the illusion of a face or expression”.
But the facial expressions of some of the figures as well as the highly revealing titles he himself gave them suggest otherwise: titles like Sequence in Dispute 1 and 2; Sequence of Defragmentation; Sequence of Self-eradication; Sequence of Uncertainty.
If the artist doesn’t have to struggle, his art isn’t worth pursuing
The emotions are there to distract from the lines, Kane says somewhat enigmatically, but then muses: “The starting point avoids emotion, but emotion somehow creeps in”, in his and his models’ interrelationship. The titles he gives months later with the benefit of distance.
Emotion is also manifest in a colour Kane sometimes selects for an object or person – “I select the colour on an emotional level, because I am attached to the subject, the people who have sat for me, so I give them a colour because I believe that’s the colour they deserve, part of their aura, part of their psyche, their wavelength.”
Kane says he is embarking on a new phase. “I want to free myself from the materiality of crafts to elevate myself, to apply materiality to a theme, to a concept, to something that’s going on in my mind. “A piece doesn’t have to be made of marble: the material doesn’t have to override where you’re coming from necessarily. So that’s the freedom I am looking for, where you don’t need a polished edge to be recognised in the practice.”
He points fondly at a bust of an Ethiopian woman segmented into a sinuous veil and mask, and enthuses: “I love fabric: It’s very visceral. I love the effect of fabric being scanned. As it captures it, you really feel the weight. I want to work more with fabric, I’m not sure how yet but I have this wish to use real fabric, wet it, throw it over someone. If it’s wet, it lets the body come through.”
His Ethiopian model appears to have simply walked in by chance, but he wanted her because she was different, with a different physiognomy which was captured by his scanner, undistracted by “race or colour”. “It was purely objective,” he says.
He strongly refutes the idea that 3D modelling as a tool overrides the so-called artistic instinct, saying that 3D is a language that “you need to be familiar with to be successful”. He says there is intimacy with software equivalent to the intimacy the artist has with the paint brush. He compares 3D modelling by itself to music without a conductor. “You can have a tune in your mind. It doesn’t mean you can create sound without the skill to compose and bring the essence of that music to life.”
His search for artistic freedom does not diminish his reverence for digital technology. “I always say of my art that it’s machine-made and hand-finished, reflecting the volatility of being human – the scratch you might give it, you know”.
Alongside his search for freedom is a pervasive and paradoxical sense of the “shrinking self in a digital world”, one where “the distance between people seems to disappear, the boundaries of self quickly appear blurred, identity lost, copied or even corrupted.”
But his is a realistic, not a pessimistic, vision, one which embraces progress. He is excited by the endless potential of the digital world, which is bringing about a renaissance in itself. “3D art contributes enormously to new beneficial discoveries, such as building new organs in medicine. We’re on the edge of the unknown, an ethical unknown. It excites me and troubles me.”
Nominations for the Premju Għall-Arti 2017 are accepted till October 27. The award covers projects, productions or activities in the cultural and creative sectors that have been premiered or presented between September 1, 2016 and August 31, 2017. The award is held under the auspices of the Arts Council Malta.
www.artscouncilmalta.org