Tony Cragg seeks new relationships between people and the material world in his sculptural practice, placing no limits on the materials he uses, just as there are no boundaries to the ideas or forms he envisions. Describing himself as a ‘radical materialist’, the artist sees sculpture as a study of how material forms shape our ideas and emotions, exploring how the internal structures of materials determine their external appearance. Cragg views human-made objects as ‘fossilised keys from the past existing in our present.’ In his works, which push the boundaries of the materials he uses and those that can be used in traditional sculpture, the artist blurs the line between human-made and natural landscapes. His familiar, sublime, and undulating forms, where each contributing element relates to a unified whole, evoke micro and macro structures found in nature but do not mimic them, prompting viewers to consider why things appear the way they do and why existence is as it is.
