Research: Artist - Ian Kiaer

Ian Kiaer’s (b.1971, London, UK) work is indebted to histories of painting, sculpture, architecture, literature and theory, but its central interest is repurposing: the waste, recovery and reconstitution of meaning. For over two decades, the artist has utilised found materials as a means to explore the latent legacies of lost ideas, the memories that physical objects preserve and the often-unseen relationships between material things.

‘The idea that one makes something from scratch is always false’, Kiaer says. ‘When making, you are involved in a conversation, you are taking up what someone else has already said and developing it. In this way, reuse can be a form of listening to what has been as well as what is.’ I couldn't agree more with this.

As technology has reached a certain pinnacle, it has become difficult to create something new from what has already happened, and I believe that in contemporary times innovation of new things often has to be developed and extended from what is already there. As the theme of my postgraduate project was nostalgia, I needed to research more old things related to my theme and use them as a basis for my design.

Ian's creative vision is very much in line with the design concept of my project, Nostalgia, and his words are a conceptual support for my work. Nostalgic design and nostalgic marketing cannot be separated from old things and memories of the past.

https://alisonjacques.com/artists/ian-kiaer