Garrett Ure

My work is initiated through material play and experimentation with the ways in which a medium can be manipulated into a sculptural form. My curiosity as a practitioner creates insatiable desire to invent and interrogate new methods and approaches to making.

I avoid using adhesives as I take great pleasure in finding innovative solutions to problems to produce cultivated objects. I enjoy working with materials in a way that demonstrates their own physicality, allowing the mediums I use to speak for and support themselves and my sculptures often make direct reference to this self-sufficiency.

My practice encompasses themes surrounding sustainability, recycling, and traditional handcrafted objects with a distinct focus on the materialism of the sculptures as the subject matter. I have a relationship with both old and new objects which I have explored within my latest body of work, involving the fragmented “restoration” of a vintage oak whiskey barrel, serving as both a sculptural curiosity and a vessel of historic prevalence. The work plays with the idea of upcycling as an artistic vehicle through both the inclusion and removal of patina on the whiskey barrel surface, questioning whether the wood itself would be significant if its earned scars from its past life were removed with a spokeshave, representing the barrel as a potentially new piece of wood. Additionally, the inclusion of several internal casts in natural latex and recycled silicone of the sculpture, featuring wood shavings from the object’s construction, set about repurposing the biproduct of my practice as instrumental building blocks of my own recycled artistic medium for sculptural creation.