Offcuts: Snow Series One / 1 - Limited Edition 1 of 1 Photograph

'Offcuts' as an Art Practice My creative art practice is informed by my occupation as a designer and maker of furniture and an underlying academic interest in Taoism, the role of its ancient artists as interpreters of the philosophy and their continuing influence on contemporary Eastern art. 'I used to make art objects from the Offcuts of my furniture making: now I let the off-cuts themselves make art of my workmanship. Offcuts from a worked object evoke a negative, rejected space; the worked object itself occupies a space valued, deliberated, tooled. I work with these apparent opposites to reclaim the harmonies neither can achieve alone'. In Western culture 'Offcuts' are considered superfluous, tat, rubbish, unnecessary, disconnected, unrecognised, forgotten, rejected, thrown out, reconstituted, recycled, or destroyed. In the case of the artist, and his studio practice, the Offcuts are given new meaning and value by being transformed into an art context. The Offcuts are an integral part of the commissioned 'object'. They share a joint identity, a story, a similar temporal journey, an energy expelled, a mark of significance. The Offcut tells us about something which is not there. In Taoist philosophy it is termed as a principle of 'mutual arising' - you cannot have one without the other. The material and process of making, and chance takes my practice forwards, I currently focus on sculpture, Cyanotype photograms (often using the sun's energy), printmaking and video (https://www.youtube.com/user/jeremycosmodavies53?feature=mhee).