Luke McCreadie

I work with sculpture, video, sound, drawing and writing. I create sculptures that symbolise meeting points between the verbal and the non-verbal or pre-verbal. I use HD animation software to make animations and 3D prints of hyper-real objects. I refer to these as the software dreaming of real objects. I use my own writing to pre-empt interpretation and further complicate the viewer’s relationship with the material, asking, “How do we really look at stuff in our overly verbalised landscape?”

In this origin scene of object relationships, something is established – or destabilised. Visual associations become linguistic connections, become physical sensation. Words and ideas tangle with physical action and materials. Now made tangible, language becomes something I chew and break down. Words into letters, letters into sounds. Language, and its material associations, become a masticated jumble in my mouth. It’s confusing where the subject, the “I,” begins and ends. The mouth is where the outside and inside meet – the beginning and end of the self.

This uncanny existential moment, with its physical and conceptual dissonance, has lingered. It haunts. In my work, language has become a sculptural material and a malleable form. It is ingested and becomes part of the body. You are what you eat. It is spat out, shat out, and moulded. What was once fixed and certain becomes a loosely flapping phonology, leaving material objects and their associations liberated and playful.

I make things that are recognisable but illegible. It’s not a straightforward reading. Materials behave like body parts; objects stand in for words. Meanings are unmoored from their phonetic and material signifiers. You have to get a feel for it – try pronouncing a few words. Make sense of it by inhabiting it or picking it up. Gain a foothold, get a grip.

Working across sculpture, video, drawing, and installation, I reconstitute materials and objects into a personal syntax and sculptural grammar. Things are made to feel and explain things that can’t be explained or understood with words alone.