Artist Profile Garnet Willis

Willis’s masterful reclaimed forms give voice to material resonance.

Artist Statement

Homo Sacer: the outcast, the exile, a liminal being whose existence, cursed and at the same time sacred, is neither governed by the law nor accountable to it; a being whose fate is at the mercy of the gods and whose death at the hands of others can be neither murder nor sacrifice; a being whose life is of pure indifference to the state from which they are banned, and thus liberated.

This series of constructions first suggested itself to me as I was stacking left-over plywood from which various parts of my kinetic sculptures and other projects had been cut. In the stack, a jangle of contraposed negative spaces caught and held my attention, and began to suggest new life and possibility where, before, I had seen only cast-offs. From the very first, my work has been about finding ways to liberate the voice of my materials (frequently, but not always or only, wood): to allow texture, grain, density and resonance to find a vocabulary that can speak for itself. At that moment, the scrap heap in my wood shop announced itself in a language that I realised had surrounded me since childhood but to which, until that moment, I had never paid attention. Immediately, I started experimenting with these internal form/spaces by changing the order of sheets, and sometimes swapping one sheet for another, with each change resulting in a thoroughgoing transformation—each speaking in its own patois of its own laws, its own properties, its own dynamics. Each alteration or addition has to settle—and I have to learn the inflexions of each new regional dialect. Changes unfold gradually over extended periods of time until the piece pronounces its own conclusion. Through this slowly unfolding process, each work in the Homo Sacer series becomes a society of exiles that have found their common tongue: a dynamic family that could only coalesce once released from external expectation to the freedom of uncertainty that opens beyond the intentional and quotidian.

This piece (#4) is the first of the series experimenting with non rectilinear framing and abstracted human form with reclaimed wood from one of my installations as well mechanical clock experiments.

Artist Biography

Garnet Willis is a Canadian interdisciplinary artist, audio engineer, composer and instrument builder. He combines his disparate skills as designer, wood and metal-worker, sound engineer and electronics geek to produce multivariate artworks that explore the interplay between physical form, musical interface, and sound. His artistic practice explores the crossroads between sensation, form over time, sentient matter, and material agency. He enjoys team collaborations—especially when he gets to design and build new types of lively and challenging objects. Recently in his own work he has revisited his background in music composition to develop stochastic shapeshifting sculptures that utilize complex material calculations driven by internal stresses resulting in unpredictable, real-time changes in physical form. He has garnered prestigious international awards for his artworks, compositions and recordings, including the Bourges Prize (1995), and the Ars Electronica Golden Nica (2025.) He has had his work exhibited and performed in the USA, UK, France, Austria, Germany, Italy, Mexico, the Netherlands, Belgium, Portugal, Croatia and Colombia. He has written/built many commissioned works including his “’flux” series of self-playing electromagnetic sound sculptures.