IAIN FRASER ARTIST STATEMENT

Awareness

Expanding the traditional ideas of architecture,
examining the visceral experience of place.



Embracing the adventure of imaginative speculation.


Considering neglected urban spaces, infrastructure, and other memories,

finding the surprise of beauty there,

changing perceptions of the ugly.



Imagining it differently,

Building expressive constructs,
inventing and assembling mysterious places that engage curiosity,
offer wonder and awe,
even spatial disorientation,
uncertainty
and ambiguities of scale and purpose.


Means

Testing the expressive potential of the conventional palette of architecture,
creating unexpected relationships between steel, concrete, glass and wood.


challenging the accepted connotations of these materials.

Probing the possibilities of place and experience,
inhabiting the places realized during the building process,


using distortion and inflection to de–familiarize,

pushing the co-existence of the rough and the polished,


promoting the acceptance and celebration of the neglected.

 

Sources

Foraging the recent past
of Modernism,
of the eclecticism of the Amsterdam School,
of the visions of Russian Constructivism and Italian Futurism,
of the ever present authenticity of vernacular architecture,
and
exploring the surprising realm of inventiveness
emerging
on the extreme edge of habitation.