If you were a sculptor you might find 3D printers a little threatening: these bastard machines can make perfectly in seconds something which would take you months to make imperfectly. It’s like seeing your ex with some ultra-advanced sexy super-robot. You just can’t compete, can you? Well, young British artist Matthew Darbyshire is trying to, by becoming his very own analogue 3D printer. The sculptures here – female figures of tightly coiled ceramic with bulky men’s feet and hands – weren’t moulded or carved, they were extruded: their material expertly manipulated, emerging in a single sausage-esque stream of clay.
The figures themselves are impressively made, a real feat of material manipulation, a clash of physical and conceptual. They’re neither human nor inhuman, just somewhere uncomfortably in between.
Their coiled masses sit on raised platforms in a room covered in road aggregate and shredded colourful plastic, with Victorian benches for you to sit on and admire the vista. It’s like a post-apocalyptic garden, a dystopian future sculpture park. The shattered plastic littering the ground feels like hundreds of destroyed machines for you to stamp on, as if Darbyshire’s sculptures mark a return to the human touch after centuries of machine rule. Yes, I have been reading a lot of science fiction lately, but this installation is just the right amount of immersive, ambiguous, clever and pretty to take you on some kind of journey, and that can only be a good thing. Unless you’re a 3D printer.