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Choice blogs - Liliana Sanchez selects Nicola Naismith
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Nicola Naismith, 'Plaster RP part/object - Removing excess material with pressurised air', Digital Photograph, June 2010. Photo: Polly Cruse.
To make something completely free from faults or defects and as close to such a condition as possible was one of the main goals of modernity. Living in non-stop big cities, surrounded by gigantic engineering structures that crawl, expand and grow to fulfil the desire of perfection in time reminds us of this modern project. The artist Nicola Naismith enters this territory to explore the entangled and complex relationship between art and technology. Through her journey, she uses high-tech machines to create images that by their formal qualities are trying to counterbalance a world dictated by control and precision.
The process of making can reveal the dialogue between us and our surrounding and the media we use becomes a language that mirrors that constant negotiation. I selected Naistmith’s blog because it attempts to expose this complex relationship between art and technology. Naismith finds joy at the interior of a fabric, but rather than a noisy and dirty place she arives at a clean and aseptic post-industrial environment that pushes her to face industrial forms of production ruled by different principles.
To expose the bones of this new kind of machinery can bring us again to think about modernity and its utopian models of the future and make us aware of the risk of enchantment by forms free from contamination. The intention to humanise our experience is important in order not just to operate technology; it brings to mind the necessity of adding new values to the application of scientific knowledge beyond its practical purposes in a way that can challenge our sense and experience of daily life.
Liliana Sanchez is a Columbian artist currently living and working in London. Visit her website here
Go to Nicola Naismith's blog Digital making
First published: a-n.co.uk August 2010
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