The ambitious machine drawings of Canberra based Jay Kochel seek to articulate the imperceptible by inverting notions of solidity and immateriality. Inspired by Japanese concepts of meditation and perception, Kochel creates ‘air studies’ that extract, map and translate both the physical world and our sensory experience of it.
Jay Kochel’s forthcoming exhibition features his exploration of 3D modelling and scanning, transforming digital data into a series of linear geometric engravings on metal and enamel. This body of work is the product of a recent month-long residency at the Fremantle Arts Centre.
'These works began as a series of paper balloons made during a residency in 2022 at the Fremantle Arts Centre, Perth. Ranging in size from half a metre to 3 metres in span, inflatable sculptures made from brown paper, mylar and plastic table cloth, were digitised with an iPad and handheld 3D scanner. The point cloud information generated from this process - digital air - is then transformed into virtual mesh, a mathematics of surface and polygons. From this information, calculations are rendered into lines. into machine instructions.
Images onto aluminium are produced slowly and laboriously over many hours with a modified plotter, while the 3D objects are made with light in soybean derived resin and copper crystals are then electrically grown on their surface.' - Artist Statement 2023
Meanwhile Catalogue essay by Elli Walsh, 2023 For Jay Kochel, air and nothingness are, paradoxically, the pillars of his practice. Working across several complex stages with impressive technical prowess, the Canberra artist creates machine drawings that quarry the haptics of immateriality, and the pliability of perception.
Kochel’s series ‘Meanwhile’ continues a process he began many years ago in Japan while on a residency at the Kyoto Arts Centre. A small handheld 3D scanner creates digital models of inflated sculptural forms, handmade from brown paper, gold mylar or any membrane taped together to make a rudimentary balloon. The digital scans are rendered into flat meshes that are then worked on to produce drawings with a plotter and scribe to engrave aluminium. These ethereal engravings on brushed aluminium and enamel engage with the trope of air as a separator, and a void to fill. Kochel terms the works 'air studies', or 'reading air', alluding to the Japanese phrase 'to read air' – similar to reading between the lines of a social situation. Temporality and spatiality cease to exist in the ghostly engraved marks, which profile invisible forces like strange celestial nets. Embryonic forms twist and turn in space, incarnating before our eyes. There is the sense, here, of possibility, plasticity, and promise.
For the first time, ‘Meanwhile’ also includes a collection of three-dimensional works, produced from the same formative scans of the engravings. The undulating surfaces of the original inflated objects are articulated through 3D-printed resin meshes, which Kochel describes as a “strange sci-fi process”. Resin is manufactured from soybeans and is sensitive to a wavelength of UV light that hardens the resin in microscopic layers. The artist explains, “I love the series of translations, from brown paper and mylar, scanned with a low-level laser, into ones and zeros, but more fundamentally, magnetic inscriptions, then translated into soybeans with light.” He uses a process of electroforming to cover the surface of the meshes with copper, and the resulting copper-plated prints are housed within vitrines of timber and acrylic.
The nebulous forms in this series feel somewhat reassuring – nostalgic, even – via the connective tissue of their Muppets titles, which include Kermit, Fozzy, Bert and Ernie. Complexity and innovation collide with childhood and innocence in a vivacious whirl ripe with representational currency. One of Kochel’s more evocative engravings, perhaps, is Squiggle (Mister), the allusive title encouraging the viewer to search for delineative imagery within the web of white contours and the burgeoning charcoal mass. The silhouetted side profile of a man’s bust orbits in and out of recognition, dissolving into shifting sand dunes, constellations, turbulent bodies of water, membranes and fabric. It is mesmerising, this ability of Kochel’s amorphous forms to conjure pictures, memories, and allusions. Though every work commands its own autonomous space for expression, and reflection, if read as a collective the series unfolds like a succession of film stills (indeed, American Beauty’s iconic plastic bag scene comes to mind, in deconstructed frames). Each form is a fossilised micro-moment from the same fleeting motion, and we see the poetry in the prosaic.
ARTIST BIO: Based in Canberra, Jay Kochel completed his Doctorate in Philosophy (Visual Art) at the Australian National University, School of Art, in 2013. In 2014 he was awarded an Arts ACT Project Funding Grant and an Asialink Residency to the Kyoto Art Center, Japan. At the time his research has focused on scent and methods of representing the unseen. This research was part of a Vice Chancellor’s Visiting Artist Fellowship at the ANU College of Physical and Mathematical Sciences and the Research School of Chemistry. Kochel has a multidisciplinary approach to his art practice and research methodology.
Kochel has won several awards including joint winner of the M16 Artspace Drawing Prize (2016); recipient of the Neil Roberts Award (2008) and the Anthony Forge Prize for Anthropology (2004). Prior to completing an undergraduate degree in sculpture and interactive media he studied a combined Bachelor of Anthropology and Law in 1996. Kochel’s doctoral studies focused on the relationship between fetish, magic and contemporary art. The majority of his fieldwork was conducted at the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford and the Musée du quai Branly, Paris, where he researched the artefactual history of fetishism. Jay Kochel was the winner of the 2017 FLG Exploration Award for Emerging Artists.
