do ho suh: staircase

where do you work on your designs and projects?
I have two studios, one in new york and one near seoul.
that is where I make my work, where I give form to my
work. the conceptualization part happens in-between
places, when in transit, like in an airport,
on the airplane or on the train - those in-between places.
I think I have more inspiration when I don't actually make
something. in the beginning, I didn't like traveling too much.
but now it's part of my job. I have to travel a lot and I sort
of developed a habit to use that time for more creative
things. for example, instead of reading, I actually do a lot of
sketching during a flight. I carry a very small sketchbook.
that has been the same format since my college days.
I travel light too, so I always carry those little things and
make sketches.

Skaer makes sculptures, films and drawings mainly based on photographs sourced from newspapers and books as well as pictures taken off the Internet, and assembles them in installations. The transformation of her found material into pictures and objects is an elaborate, often manual process that also involves the collaboration of craftsmen. What results is a push and pull between representation and the still recognizable meaning and physical shape of the original subject matter. T

richard serra

Richard Serra's monumental steel sculptures are covered in rust. The 68-year-old American artist's work at the Gagosian in King's Cross, on show in London for the first time in 16 years, may all be new but they ooze oxidation. Orange specks that flake off, or flashes of silver through oil-slick blackness, the layered textures speak of another element.

And walking through them is like entering another element, chatter in the gallery muffled and reverberating to become a kind of whalesong. Two giant funnels called TTI London resemble beached hulls, their high-tide levels marked by mottled metal. Moving through the space makes each surface undulate, the top edges gently curving out of vision like an ushering maître d'.

There's not a straight line in the main gallery: beyond TTI, the towering black Open Ended leans in on itself menacingly. It has been likened to a maze but it's one without a heart; keep going, and you reach the edge again without ever feeling as though you've been at the centre.

It's a brilliant deception that Serra has choreographed as well as sculpted. In an anteroom, however, another piece is all straight edges. A huge block of steel leaks colour through accumulated layers and scored lines, as rich as any Turner landscape.

mike nelson : amnesiac pieces

Mike Nelson who presents a new, immersive Amnesiac Shrine. After a hiatus of nearly a decade the Amnesiacs, a mythical gang of bikers invented by the artist in the mid-1990s, have made a recent comeback. Here Nelson turns to them once again for their help in building AMNESIAC SHRINE or The misplacement (a futurological fable): mirrored cubes - inverted - with the reflection of an inner psyche as represented by a metaphorical landscape 2007. The materials and references used to construct it, provided by ‘flashbacks’ from the Amnesiacs, are elevated by their devotional context yet remain largely indefinable.

Hesse defined the word ‘schema’ as ‘synopsis, outline, diagram. general type, essential form, conception of what is common to all members of a class.’27 While the evenly-spaced, balanced grid of her eponymous sculpture (fig.9) may be read in terms of Hesse’s definition, her interest in ‘diagram’ and ‘essential form’ are also expressed in the meticulous planning and rigor with which she approached its design, including her choice of material. In addition to drawings,28 Hesse made numerous ‘test pieces’ (fig.10) prior to the execution (by her own hand or otherwise) of many of her works. She used these ‘material studies’ to experiment with the structural properties of rubber, papier-mâché, Sculp-Metal, and other matter so as to determine, in part, their potential usefulness in crafting specific forms like hemispheres, cylinders, and various vessels. For Schema, she chose to work in latex, as she did many of her sculptures dating from the late 1960s and about which she stated: ‘the materials I use are really casting materials, but I don’t want to use them as casting materials. I want to use them directly, eliminating making molds and casts ... I am interested in the process, a very direct kind of connection