The Industrial Age enabled humans to expand so quickly, and one consequence is the climate catastrophe we’re living in today. While we may now be in the Information Age, it’s this industrial machinery that enables the modern comforts of living, yet it’s largely hidden from view. How many of us see how cars, clothes, and furniture are made? Ayodeji Kingsley brings this industrial machinery back into the foreground by transforming discarded machinery, tools, and industrial detritus into sculpture.
He uses these discarded parts to sculpt creatures from the natural world, in a knowing nod to the irony that the very machinery used to create the artwork has separated us from it. We have reached a point where many urban dwellers aren’t able to recognise some of the most common animals you may find a few miles outside of the city.
The peak of this irony may be seen in ‘Hoof Hearted’, a metal sculpture of a horse’s head. Until the dawn of the machine age, it was horses that did much of humanity’s heavy labour. Once supplanted, their numbers declined significantly, and they were retained only for leisure activities. In recreating a horse from metal, it recognises one of the most significant transitions in human history.
Kingsley’s heritage is Nigerian, which provides vital context for his work. A lot of the industrial and technological waste from the Western world ends up in Africa, and so creating works from industrial leftovers is a commentary on the unseen problems that old machinery creates and the recognition that we need to approach the globalised world through a more sustainable lens.
Art itself has had to face several questions about its sustainability, given its use of oil-based products and the carbon footprint of shipping. It’s through the use of discarded materials that I’m seeing a lot of the innovation in art. While the use of found materials goes back to Marcel Duchamp’s Urinal, the need to utilise them for sustainability feels like it’s only just getting started. The use of scrap metal in art is likely to increase as sustainability takes on a stronger role, and these works suggest that Kingsley is a forerunner of this movement.
This merging of the delicately sculpted and the readymade is evident in a work in which two rats scramble over a fire extinguisher. It’s a playful work but also reminds us that our detritus is also affecting the natural world, where animals work our rubbish into their lives, often to devastating effects, think of animals caught up in plastic causing them to suffocate.
Ayodeji Kingsley’s sculptures can be taken at face value as technically crafted artworks, the product of hours of skill and labour. However, there’s also deeper messaging within them about the Anthropocene age we’re living in, our disconnection from nature, sustainability, and our responsibility as the species that has damaged the earth and is also the one species that can save it.
More information on Ayodeji Kingsley’s work may be found on his website and Instagram.
