Centered between sculpture and print-media, the interdisciplinary practice of Richard Blackwell involves a network of objects, a collage of marks, observations and processes, representing his felt experiences of the city. Parsed by printmaking, robotic fabrication and advanced manufacturing technology, produced through idiocractic systems of and automation, Blackwell’s work analyses the changing mechanics of human labour, considering the ways in which human limitations can be transcended by creating systems of production that supplant manual labour. His work, largely, is a reflection of what it means to make physically and digitally, in the context of the urban landscape.
Created with film faced plywood, his recent relief works deal with ideas of modularity, fusing individual experience with architectonic space. Grappling with the unknown ways in which virtuality is changing our social reality and collapsing geographical space, the works function as urban cartography, and yet they also map the complicated, lonely virtual spaces that are rapidly subsuming contemporary (Western) existence.
Expanded Bio in Snippets
Career
Richard Blackwell is an interdisciplinary artist, technician and the advanced manufacturing lab coordinator of UNSW’s Design futures lab.
Robotics Research and Education
Richard’s research interests include robotic fabrication and collaborative automation. He holds extensive teaching and practice led experience and parametric and modular furniture design, Digital fabrication and ‘processed image’ artistic disciplines.
Collaborative Practice
Richard has an experimental artistic practice, including co-creating ‘Made By Qatar’, a practice lead Sand Casting and Alluminium recycling workshop for the 2019 Istanbul design biennial, and an ongoing collaboration with Kate Conlon, culminating most recently in the exhibition ‘Doubling The Cube’, (2016, mana Contemporary in Chicago, IL.
Gallery Exhibition Practice
Richard has personal exhibition experience including his most recent solo exhibition ‘Labyrinth’, (flinders lane gallery, 2020) , and his work been collected for ACT Legislative Assembly, Artbank, NAB Collection, and the Justin Collection.
Public Art Practice
Richard has undertaken several public commissions including a ‘Modular Reflective Surface 2’ a building facade design for the Mayfare Apartments In Canberra and ‘Nexus’, an embedded ground plane design, undertaken with Urban Art Projects in the Fortitude Valley in Brisbane.
Advanced Manufacturing Lab
The Advanced manufacturing lab strives to support research activity through fabrication and technical facilitation in the areas of clay deposition for the built environment, collaborative robotics in the built environment, robotic fabrication, subtractive processing of composite and recycled materials.
Studio Studio
studio studio is a collaborative visual arts studio co-founded by Richard Blackwell and Robbie Karmel in Mitchell ACT. In addition to acting a the production centre of Richards artistic works, it is an experimental creative practice lab.