Loss is a human traveller in a digital world. He has been digitalised and then decimated. His identity truncated for only necessary metadata.
Courtesy of Nanda\Hobbs Contemporary
Louis Pratt lives and works in Sydney. In 2000 he studied sculpture at the ANU School of Art, graduating with First Class Honours. In 2002 the College of Fine Art UNSW, awarded him an Australian Post-Graduate Research scholarship for a Master's degree that he completed in 2004. From 2003 he began teaching in the COFA sculpture department and did so for 12 years.
In 2016 alone Louis has been a winner in the Wollongong Bicentennial Sculpture Award, the Tom Bass Sculpture Award and the Toorak Village Sculpture Exhibition. His works are recognised in numerous private and public collections. 2015 saw his sculptures represented in every major sculpture award in Australia. His most notable award was the inaugural Mt Buller Sculpture Prize 2013.
Louis' approach to sculpture is to take 3D scan data of people from the real world into the digital world. With these digitised forms he employs digital tools to manipulate the scanned data. The tools include many types of algorithms and their application to sculpture. The next stage is to rapid prototype back from cyberspace into the real world. Once there, he applies 3D printing experimentally to casting and materials.
Louis makes the point that we are at an historical point in history in terms of technology and its effects on our lives. His approach is to examine and mimic a global process in works of art. At one level he depicts our appetite for fossil fuels, while at an another he looks at our insatiable desire for the cyber world. Social issues pervade Louis' work; he sees his art as a mirror reflecting where we are socially and historically. Sometimes the tone is reproachful but mostly his art examines the contemporary world with a sense of its beauty.
3D printed plastic, steel, paint
80 x 24 x 24 cm
Finalist
Judges of the 2016 Woollahra Small Sculpture Prize: Wendy Whiteley OAM (Ambassador for the visual arts), Rhonda Davis (Senior Curator at Macquarie University Art Gallery) and Barry Keldoulis (CEO and Group Fairs Director of Art Fairs Australia).
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