am also in the process of making an installation
of hundreds of laser-cut pieces that will measure approximately nine by 30 feet at the Coda
Museum in Holland, and a smaller wall-based
installation (six by four feet) of cellular sculptures that will be exhibited in the US in Maine
at the MDI Laboratory.
DM: You make it a point to hand cut most of your
work. Considering the method to be performative,
however, you have done a few laser cut pieces. What
are the benefits between hand cutting certain pieces
and laser cutting others? Does your chosen method of
cutting affect the meaning behind a piece?
RB: Actually, half my work is hand cut and half
is laser cut. Because paper is cheap and easy to
laser cut, it lends itself well to large-scale composite installations. You can also create much
more detailed work on a smaller scale with a
laser. A piece such as Clone would be almost
impossible by hand. On a conceptual level, the
hand cut work signifies in a completely different
way because process is really more important
than the finished artifact. The hand cut pieces
can take up to five months to complete, and all
this time, patience and labor is visible in every
slice and cut. People respond very positively to
this aspect of the work. In a digital age where
everything that surrounds us is designed and
built by computer-controlled machines, this
return to craft, to the hand made, is becoming
increasingly rare, although I have been linked
with other artists, designers, and architects as
being part of the ‘post-digital’ movement, marking a return to ‘tactile, physically immersive
experience’. I hand cut in this painstaking way
because I want to communicate that the act of
‘seeing’ is a difficult one, requiring enormous
effort and concentration to penetrate through
habitual ways of looking in order to see something from a different angle or a fresh perspective. The idea of scale is important here too. I
believe that we struggle to comp