Process has meaning. The process that lies beneath a medium means that each medium says something that cannot be uttered as well or completely in any other tongue. For some time now, Coral Woods has been exploring digital portraits that translate freely from virtual to real and back again, using an old Kinect 3D scanner. The drop-outs and changes due to file reduction create fascinating interpretative gaps that link to theories in Gestalt and Walter Benjamin's definition of 'aura' in 'Art in the age of mechanical reproduction'. 

 

Sometimes she is in command, and sometimes she has to follow anarchies created by the machine. This back-and-forth decision-making, in an iterative flow of process, combines sculptural craft with modern technology, and seeks to discover ways of redefining not just sculptural portrayal of the human body, but also the space it inhabits with humour and serendipity. Reducing and simplifying natural forms pushes them into becoming biomorphic abstractions. In a formalism created by combining embodied knowledge and accidental mechanical interference, the machines are collaborating in exploring themes of aura, time and wholeness.

​

Coral Woods likes to surprise by combining new and traditional materials and methods. She is able to move fluidly between digital to crafts when choosing media, and enjoy playing with the constraints and synergies between the two. Her artistic research and practice combines crafting real materials that are highly tactile and conceptual. She is interested in creating repetitions of objects and the animated signs of wear that are created through processing and mechanical manipulation.

​

*  *  *

​

Primarily a sculptor, Coral Wood's art is a unique blend of the sensuous and abstract that explores what it means to be a woman, mother and 'silver'. She combines new materials and processes with traditional craft knowledge, and aspires to build monumental artworks on a grand scale. She has made works that animate on a grand scale in her art partnership as TROPE, but she now want to construct her own monumental pieces.