Red Sentinel / Yellow Sentinel stand watch, ready for action, almost transforming into enlarged playing pieces that are set to engage with the landscape they sit in. Referencing structures found in West’s CGI video work, they continue his exploration into notions of gaming, role playing, purpose, work and labour.

West explores objects and materials within the studio and translates these into the virtual environment. The process of creating objects within a virtual space is entirely removed from the hand and would intuitively appear as to be a process that is polarised to the more traditional ways of making that make up a sculptural practice – be it the turning of a bit to create a hole in metal, or the shaving and refining of wood with a plane to flatten and remove signs of it’s natural form.Sitting at the boundary between these spaces is the laser cutter- a crucial tool in the making of the work. Like the computer program itself, it’s a machine that removes the need for any physical action via the human hand A virtual drawing is created as a series of instructions pointing from A to B to C – there is no physicality in this line when drawn on the computer but it is transformed into something deeply tangible when cut: it becomes a hardened edge with a definite texture, a sign of the physical process of heat burning through steel. The idea of ‘the machine’ continues as a central theme in his practice. A machine is ultimately an object created to remove man from the need to labour. And so through its repetitive, unthinking actions this mechanical functioning acquires an apparent purposefulness – it transforms these blind movements into acts of ritual. Parts are created that appear to have purpose but are then repeatedly stacked in way that beguile any useful function. Questioning ideas of purpose and function, and exploring the roles of work and labour in our society.

Jack West (Born in Harlow, Lives and works in Somerset, UK) graduated with a MFA in Sculpture from Slade School of Fine Art, London (2016) and a BA in Fine Art from Chelsea College of Arts, London (2010). Solo exhibitions include: Last Man Standing, Castor, London (2022); Not Going to Work, Bomb Factory, London (2018); Time and Attendance, Castor, London (2017); Time and Attendance, Castor, London (2017). Group exhibitions include: Doubling Down, Castor offsite exhibition at Leicester Contemporary, Leicester (2021); The Factory Project with Delphian Gallery, Tate and Lyle Factory, London (2021); GUT FEELING, Art et Amicitiae, Amsterdam, Holland (2021); Contemporary Sculpture Fulmer, Sculpture Park, Fulmer, England (2019 + 2018); Relics From The De-Crypt, Gossamer Fog, London (2017); East Tower, Caustic Coastal, Manchester (2017); Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2016, ICA, London & The Bluecoat – Liverpool (2016). West was awarded the Kenneth Armitage Young Sculptor Prize and the Gilbert Bayes award for new sculpture by the Royal Society of Sculptors.