Artist Lukas Gschwandtner has been working at Blackhorse recently on his newly commissioned piece called ‘Wiener Maße’ – ‘Viennese Measurements’, a mobile pavilion. Born in Salzburg, Austria, Lukas attended art school in Vienna, learning leather craftsmanship before moving to London to study Spatial Design at Chelsea College of Arts. He found the workshop through a recommendation from a fellow artist. Over the past couple of months we have watched as the structure has taken shape. We asked him about how the project came about:
‘My point of departure for this project was a concern about the perception of time itself, which gets constantly influenced by rationality – rationality that people won’t let go, not even for a moment. Conversations became constricted by the desperate search for efficiency. Growing up in Austria where efficiency keeps being put aside by valuable idleness – is often performed in its coffee culture.
‘My friends and I always find an arrangement to fit all of us around a small coffee table, it has no limitation of participants. My response to this became a chair that can be opened out for a new participant.The Austrian sector for Design and Architecture funded me to build my project 1:1. The pavilion is meant to be a traveling object. Therefore, one can assemble the whole construction sliding each part into one another. The fact that it can be built up easily with two hands allows the Viennese culture to be portable, enabling people to participate at different sites and environments. It encourages a gathering focusing on shared words, often forgotten in our rational world.
‘I have been using the metal workshop at Blackhorse to fabricate the chairs and the main structure or skeleton of the pavilion. In the upstairs studio I have worked on the claddings that are made out of plaster bandages on sheets of canvas. These have been constructed on a bent steel frame with a clamped timber panel which became the foundation for the clay molds. The molding is referencing the facade of my case study building in Vienna.’
Lukas is definitely an artist to watch, we look forward to following the journey of ‘Wiener Maße’ as it travels and develops, look out for updates soon.
What is the best thing about Blackhorse Workshop?
The best thing about the workshop is the exchange of knowledge with each other – not only workshop related topics, which shapes my understanding of crafts and its field.