Sam Zealey
Samuel Zealey appropriates popular household and industrial appliances in order to find strange and unknown functions in their performances, motivated by a desire to catalyse domestic equivalents of spectacular events that you might see only once in your life, if ever, like a dying star.
Zealey becomes inspired by the properties of materials he uses when making a piece of work. These properties are usually fundamental to the workings of the sculpture and enable elusive energy to interact with the materials used. These elusive energies can be transformed into many different types of physical, visual or acoustic performances.
Although Zealey makes sculpture that is evolving with the modern world he is also inspired by history and in particular by many 19th and 20th century events, such as the engineering of Isambard Kingdom Brunel during the industrial revolution and WW II.
Zealey attempts to make an uncommon experience common in a controlled situation, by constructing kinetic sculptures that form perfect microcosms of our universe. And so he operates as a sort of artist/scientist/engineer translating the ordinary into the impossible, and recreating scientific and celestial phenomena out of spinning tops, magnets, vacuum cleaners and running machines.
Kyte
"The industrial energy making the wind from the fans flies the kite. I was looking at other ways that you could create the same effect for an invention that already exists, using its function (the kite) by unconventional means. (This sculpture is at prototype stage. Eventually I wish to fly a glider with the aid of aerodynamics fans)."
Sam Zealey, 2009