As a metal sculptor and self-taught machinist, I use an array of homemade and modified CNC tools built from repurposed and salvaged equipment. In my quest to create my intricate metal sculptures, it has become part of my practice to construct custom robotic machine tools that increase the range and diversity of fabrication methods with which to experiment. In doing so, I find visual inspiration through an ever-expanding mechanical palette of techniques and industrial processes. Processes that I can explore for their aesthetic possibilities and use as a conceptual lens for how the work they produce might be viewed in a broader context.

For many artists working with digital fabrication techniques, a CNC system can simply function as an output device, rendering digital forms into physical matter, efficiently replacing methods like carving and casting. Owing to their material complexity, my sculptures cannot be realized in such a perfunctory way. Structured much like the machines used to make them, each design is a meticulous array of parts that marry form with their mechanical function within the assembly. The works are fundamentally engineered, designed and assembled employing innovative mechanics and other techniques that reference the tools that created them. These same tools are responsible for fabricating nearly every material object we interact with in modern life.

The use of digital fabrication technologies also suggests new contexts for the art objects they produce. They are tools of mass production, yet when employed for the purpose of “one of a kind” art creation, they suggest other ways they may be employed. Also, the technical constraints of the craft require one’s ideas to be geometrically defined in such a way that both a physical object and a series of highly detailed and quantified digital records represent them. This gives each work a dual existence as a one of a kind physical art object, and also a conceptual ideal with a series of machine tool programs, drawings, solid files, and instructions on their fabrication that has the potential to be endlessly replicated. I represent elements of this by incorporating drawing elements from the design process as a way to reference this duality as well as illustrate the underlying structure of the sculpture.

Within my work, I often play on industrial design motifs and experiment with ideas around our relationship to engineered objects. The internal logic of each sculpture suggests intentional design, which in turn implies utility; however, the work is static and ambiguous. As an art object, it refuses to fully transform the medium, making each sculpture feel like an irresolvable paradox, full of implied yet undefined purpose.

Machine work is a discipline that requires constant innovation to realize one’s creative goals. It is this innovation that fuels future creative insights. For me, it has become a self-sustaining exploration of a craft that, given its ubiquity in modern life, is enormously underrepresented as an art form.

Developing a detailed and accurate drawing has always been an integral step of my design process. The drawings functions both as a platform for refining the visual forms within the work, and as a digital reference for calculating machining tolerances and planning logistics for the actual fabrication of the piece. Over the years, they have progressed from rudimentary hand-drafted sketches on graph paper to meticulously crafted, highly detailed CAD models. During this transformation, the purpose the drawings serve in my work has also evolved; they have gone from being an item of mere utility to an important conceptual and visual element at the core of my body of work.

There is a certain amount of subversion in creating a highly accurate technical document to build what is essentially a non-functional art object. Indeed, in much of my work there is this contrast between the nature of engineering a complex array of parts that assemble in mechanically diverse ways, and the reality that the end result is an object that serves no real utilitarian purpose. My works are constructed like machines, yet they do not move or serve any function. The sculptures resonate because each one feels like an irresolvable paradox, full of implied yet undefined purpose.

In addition to the contrast between the conceptual and material nature of my craft, much of the inspiration for my forms is derived directly from the visual language inherent within my work environment. I always look to my process to lend visual cues that may serve as a catalyst for future works. In this way, my sculptures and my drawings have become a sort of feedback loop, each aspect feeding into the next, ever changing, but closely connected to what preceded it.

It may seem at first to be an insular concept, but I have found both complexity and diversity within this framework. The drawings have become indispensable at communicating this duality between the inner workings of each sculpture and the influence this has on their outward aesthetic function. Indeed, much of the engineering and design elements are completely hidden in the finished sculptures, so the schematics are a natural link between the unseen mechanical aspects of the work and its outward appearance.

That I allow my affection for my craft to be so influential should come as no surprise to other artists. Much in the way a painter falls in love with his or her paints, I have been captivated by the art of machine work. It is my muse, as well as the means by which I choose to express my own personal aesthetic and interest in our modern world, which is so full of technological developments. The drawings are a natural extension of my primary interest in sculpture, as they bridge what I find so fascinating about what I do, the built world around us, and the sculptures that result.

My efforts to share this aspect of my work through the drawings have resulted in a number of forms over the years. I have experimented with hand drawn compositions and attempted to create isometric drawings using only 2D drafting software. Most notably, I spent quite some time exploring ways of composing and printing my sketches as authentic Diazo blueprints using an ammonia vapor blueprint machine. All of these experiments have contributed to my philosophy on what a technical document can be in relationship to a meditation on machine work, drafting, and personal aesthetics.

Most recently, I have gone back to a purely digital format. Although I enjoyed making and printing actual blue line prints, the limitations of the process and the ephemeral nature of the prints it produced placed constraints on the work that no longer served a productive role. Returning to a less restrictive mode has allowed me to break free of some of those restrictions and shed the additional arbitrary rules I had used to guide my work. As a result, a rather dramatic compositional shift has recently emerged in the drawings, and I suspect many more exciting developments are yet to come.

Those of you who follow my work, know I am constantly refining the details of my sculptures through technical drawings. They represent the first step in translating my conceptual ideas into real life objects and I have posted them in many forms over the years. They are integral to my creative process and serve many functions during the fabrication of my sculpture works.
But one thing I have noticed while making these drawings is that an accurate drawing that one can utilize to build a sculpture is quite often, not a very interesting one to look at. I have dedicated a lot of thought to the task of producing both useful and interesting drawings at the same time< this has led me to try many different approaches over the years, some more successful than others.
Developing my drawings as a separate art form has meant working on them long after the sculptures they were intended to help me build were complete. I had decided that is was important that I take the same care and craftsmanship I use for my metal works and apply it to drafting each drawing. I have spent countless hours recomposing each one into a single stand-alone work that could serve as an aesthetic compliment to the sculpture it represented. My goal has always been to make drawings that were both fascinating to look at, but also technically accurate so they may provide insight on how each sculpture is engineered, which is a major part of what I find so compelling about the work I do.
But until recently, the end result of all of this work was only a digital file on my hard drive, one that I could use to produce either digital images, or conventional digital prints. I was quite happy with how these looked, but I am a hands on kind of person and I always wanted to do something more with them, something a little more tactile and tangible.
So very recently, after an off handed comment by a friend and some research, it dawned on me that what was missing was an authentic way to print the drawings that would yield something a bit more interesting and unique. Even though so much of what I do is digital, my main focus has always been about using different processes and their inherent restraints to create one of kind objects that reference the craft that is used to make them in some fundamental way. It occurred to me that drafting, as a craft happens to have a rich history of tangible, physical printing processes that can be utilized to great effect and this was something worth looking into.
So As a further homage to the process these drawings were intended to explore, I recently decided the best way to officially complete, and indeed actually print them, was to use a very old fashioned, but authentic process called Diazo Printing. Diazo printing is one of a number of different processes used to create copies of architectural and technical drawings. It was developed around the 1940’s and has since been replaced by more modern processes and so has fallen out of wide spread use, but it is still available if you are willing to search around a bit.
A lucky break on EBay and a 500-mile drive were all it took for me to become the proud owner of a very old, but perfectly functional blue print machine that I am now experimenting with.
The thing that attracted me the most about this process, was that it is sort of a manual one. All of the copies are produced using a single master drawing printed on a translucent piece of vellum paper. I really like the idea of having a single, physical master hard copy of my drawings, there is a certain finality to it that having a digital file just can't be compared to. The rest of the process involves using a light sensitive paper to create a copy of the drawing using the translucent master print. The paper is exposed to ultra violet light with the original on top of it to serve as the negative. It is then developed by passing it through a chamber of ammonia vapor that turns the light sensitive coating on the paper a deep blue. This process is often called blue lining, as the prints created are positives of the drawings, meaning the lines produced are blue on a white background.
The process that preceded Diazo, was a little different. It involved using glass plates, a different light sensitive emulsion and setting the whole mess out in the sun for many hours to expose the drawings. It produced prints that were negatives of the original, which is typically what we think of when we hear the word “blueprint” as it was characterized by white lines on a blue background.
In developing these drawings for printing, I felt it necessary to emulate both styles of prints. So you will find that half of my prints are traditional blue lines, while the other half are inverse blueprints. I think both types are a beautiful and a very genuine way to realize these drawings in a physical form.

As a metal sculptor and self-taught machinist, I use an array of homemade and modified CNC tools built from repurposed and salvaged equipment. In my quest to create my intricate metal sculptures, it has become part of my practice to construct custom robotic machine tools that increase the range and diversity of fabrication methods with which to experiment. In doing so, I find visual inspiration through an ever-expanding mechanical palette of techniques and industrial processes. Processes that I can explore for their aesthetic possibilities and use as a conceptual lens for how the work they produce might be viewed in a broader context.

For many artists working with digital fabrication techniques, a CNC system can simply function as an output device, rendering digital forms into physical matter, efficiently replacing methods like carving and casting. Owing to their material complexity, my sculptures cannot be realized in such a perfunctory way. Structured much like the machines used to make them, each design is a meticulous array of parts that marry form with their mechanical function within the assembly. The works are fundamentally engineered, designed and assembled employing innovative mechanics and other techniques that reference the tools that created them. These same tools are responsible for fabricating nearly every material object we interact with in modern life.

The use of digital fabrication technologies also suggests new contexts for the art objects they produce. They are tools of mass production, yet when employed for the purpose of “one of a kind” art creation, they suggest other ways they may be employed. Also, the technical constraints of the craft require one’s ideas to be geometrically defined in such a way that both a physical object and a series of highly detailed and quantified digital records represent them. This gives each work a dual existence as a one of a kind physical art object, and also a conceptual ideal with a series of machine tool programs, drawings, solid files, and instructions on their fabrication that has the potential to be endlessly replicated. I represent elements of this by incorporating drawing elements from the design process as a way to reference this duality as well as illustrate the underlying structure of the sculpture.

Within my work, I often play on industrial design motifs and experiment with ideas around our relationship to engineered objects. The internal logic of each sculpture suggests intentional design, which in turn implies utility; however, the work is static and ambiguous. As an art object, it refuses to fully transform the medium, making each sculpture feel like an irresolvable paradox, full of implied yet undefined purpose.

Machine work is a discipline that requires constant innovation to realize one’s creative goals. It is this innovation that fuels future creative insights. For me, it has become a self-sustaining exploration of a craft that, given its ubiquity in modern life, is enormously underrepresented as an art form.

I had the privilege this year to be commission to make a rather unique chess set. Although I usually shy away from requests to make utilitarian objects, when I was approached to undertake this particular project, I simply could not resist. History is littered with examples of fine artist making chess sets, Marcel Duchamp, Bauhaus, Calder, Damien Hirst, Yoko Ono and too many more to list have all designed chess sets during their careers. But for me the connection was much more personal.
Growing up, I had two very separate experiences building chess sets which I had all but forgotten until this project surfaced. My first set, I built when I was in middle school. I had stumbled across a large box of hardware and bolts in my basement. A find that I quickly and instinctively assembled into a crude chess set made of wing nuts and other fasteners, it was one of my first experiments with building things out of found and metal parts.
Then, years later, when in high school, I set about commissioning each of my classmates and artist friends to create one unique chess piece each for a community board I had decided to assemble. Each artist was assigned a game piece (a pawn, rook, knight and so on) and it was to be based on his or her particular art or aesthetic. The result turned out to be a bit of a jumbled mess, but it was fun nonetheless. When I look back though, both of these were very formative sculptural experiences for me, so building a chess set now seemed like a very natural concept to revisit.
The entire endeavor ended up being quite a reflective experience. It became an opportunity to look back at the visual vocabulary I had been building over the last ten years, and see if I could employ it to make something that functioned on two very distinct levels. I needed the individual pieces and even the chess board itself to some extent, to function as their intended symbols when placed in the context of a chess set, but I also wanted them to stand alone as individual sculptural works of art when they were removed from the game environment. This balancing act was one of the most difficult challenges I had ever undertaken, but I feel I was able to achieve the desired function for the set with out betraying my aesthetic in the slightest.
Chess is a very unique game that has a timeless nature to it. The same sort of timelessness many artists strive for when creating works of art. It was a wonderful project and I could not be happier with the results.

In contrast to many of his contemporaries, Chris Bathgate?s use of metal is neither structural nor illusionistic. It does not refuse to transform the medium, and it does not play on the medium?s opposites, e.g. lightness from metal?s weight, or organic forms from its rigidity.
Bathgate?s process most closely resembles that of a machine builder or engineer. In the last two years, he has become increasingly involved in using mathematical techniques. This has allowed him to achieve the high degree of precision necessary for assembling such intricate works (these sculptures are not cast). The result is indeed a transformation-the pieces fit together in such a way that they cease to appear man-made, and yet in spite of this lack of bumpiness or personal touch emanate a presence that is unmistakable and engaging.
Bathgate?s entities are like instances of a foreign intelligence. Being uninhibited by pretensions to flesh, these sculptures call a type of ?creature feeling? reflecting their intellectual (as opposed to emotional) humanism.
According to Bathgate, every sculpture is an experiment in response to an abstract opposed to pragmatic problem-it does not work towards a presumed result. From the point of view of the process, a finished work is not an end in itself but a place that one goes to.

Chris Bathgate builds finely tuned metal sculptures with an array of computer controlled (CNC) equipment of his own design. Unlike artists who use CNC devices as a finishing step, essentially printing out artworks conceived in a virtual sphere, Bathgate incorporates every aspect of how these tools function into his thinking about form. This level of involvement is necessary for the complexity of his work, but it is also fundamental to his vision, which he develops through the application and evolution of the technology at his disposal, rather than according to representational goals. Though Bathgate is, in many ways, like an engineer building machines, the internal logic of his sculptures imbues them with a sense of life, if not a formal resemblance to living things. This somewhat paradoxical result arrived at by the way that Bathgate develops forms and uses technology, realigns expectations about the artist’s relationship with their medium, and the role that plays in producing artworks by digital means.

In CNC fabrication systems the wheels and levers of conventional tools such as mills and lathes are driven by digital instructions. With the aid of software, these instructions may be generated from 3-D computer models, allowing artists to sculpt in a virtual environment. For artworks shaped from a single block of material, a CNC machine can function as a simple output device, rendering digital forms into physical matter, efficiently replacing methods like carving and casting. Having, structurally, more in common with jet engines than with the products of these traditional techniques, Bathgate's works cannot be realized in such a hands-off way. Their numerous interlocking components are milled to precisions on the order of thousandths of an inch, a technical feat depending heavily on logical as opposed to visual or manual skills. For greater control, Bathgate often writes the code that drives his machines by hand. Working in this manner, his programming language, like any other tool, suggests ways of thinking about form. From the perspective of computation, mechanical parameters, such as those describing the position of a work piece on a mill, are simply quantities represented by variables. The particular way in which Bathgate conceptualizes their relationships in the code that runs his machines, replaces what in manual crafts is known as “the hand of the artist.” In contrast to a more automatic approach, Bathgate’s deep involvement in the language of his medium allows him to exploit its unique vicissitudes to artistic effect. By the modification of values in a program, he can shape metal in the manner of a painter handling a brush.

The seeds of Bathgate's sculptures may be loose pencil sketches, but are as often ideas resulting from a new tool he has built or a new fastening system he has employed. While Bathgate fully schematizes his final designs in CAD drawings, their genesis does not proceed in a top-down fashion as it would if he were pursuing a representational objective. It is more accurate to say that his works take shape amidst the push and pull between formal ideas and material constraints. In light of the expectations engendered by virtual design and robotic execution, it is easy to overlook the fact that a piece of metal of a particular size and weight needs to be maneuvered to meet a cutting surface at a certain angle. A great deal of Bathgate's time and material actually goes into building jigs just to position pieces of a final sculpture as they are being cut. Because of the strategy required to mill metals into the complex shapes that Bathgate designs, considerations of how he can achieve certain ends help to select what his ultimate ends are. This process-oriented manner of development may seem at odds with Bathgate's polish and precision, yet it is part of what makes them possible. Being opportunistic with elements of design, Bathgate can exploit what his tools do gracefully. These occasions for virtuosity are generated in a web of logistical problems and considerations of things like material stress and the necessity of assembling parts with screws and pins. In negotiating these demands, Bathgate's works are, in a fundamental way, engineered. Their logic, however, is not directed by a mechanical function, but is inwardly focused, resolving a balance between formal interests and concrete reality, imparting them with an independent sense of purpose.

With their axes of symmetry and minimal negative space, many of Bathgate's sculptures bear a formal resemblance to animal beings. Their intricate interlocking pieces do not suggest handles and buttons, but appear to have internal necessity like the visible organs of living creatures. Nonetheless, it cannot be ignored that Bathgate's works have only the most abstract likeness to things organic. Their aesthetic of geometry and machined metal invites comparison to artifacts of technology, such as tools and fixtures, while their precision argues both for and against their being man-made. Eschewing such a tidy dichotomy, recent sculptures have incorporated weight distribution strategies not found in nature and colony-like organization unseen in familiar creatures. Some works have even become moveable, with detachable pieces and re-configurable compositions, subverting the representational mode of figure in space and recalling the interaction one has with manufactured objects. Considering that Bathgate can be said to be working in the medium of machines, it may be tempting to construe this development along the lines of a modernist narrative seeing him moving from an imitative mode to one in which the medium constitutes the subject of the art. While such stories are interesting to apply, it is also true that the contemporary understanding of biology is augmented by and conceptualized in terms of technology. Powerful microscopes reveal the alien structure of microorganisms, while computer modeling fuels speculations about extraterrestrial life, and futurists predict the advent of cybernetic beings. Given that Bathgate often speaks of his work in terms of research and experimentation, it is perhaps more appropriate to view the products of his imagination through the lens of science rather than through that of ideals such as progress.

As Bathgate's art evolves, it continues to challenge the viewer's understanding of the relationship between life and technology, both from the angle of how it appears, and from the perspective of how it is made. Standing at an intriguing distance from the virtual realm, Bathgate’s sculptures bear the imprint of a human touch even when shaped by non-manual processes. Forming his creative vision within complex engineering problems, Bathgate has created in mechanical construction an analogy to the genesis of living things. It can be seen from the way in which his work deviates from visual likeness to familiar creatures, that it owes its biological association to this genetic or conceptual correspondence, more so than to any formal similarity. In these respects, Bathgate supplies a unique and provocative contribution to the art of the digital age.

In contrast to many of his contemporaries, Chris Bathgate?s use of metal is neither structural nor illusionistic. It does not refuse to transform the medium, and it does not play on the medium?s opposites, e.g. lightness from metal?s weight, or organic forms from its rigidity.
Bathgate?s process most closely resembles that of a machine builder or engineer. In the last two years, he has become increasingly involved in using mathematical techniques. This has allowed him to achieve the high degree of precision necessary for assembling such intricate works (these sculptures are not cast). The result is indeed a transformation-the pieces fit together in such a way that they cease to appear man-made, and yet in spite of this lack of bumpiness or personal touch emanate a presence that is unmistakable and engaging.
Bathgate?s entities are like instances of a foreign intelligence. Being uninhibited by pretensions to flesh, these sculptures call a type of ?creature feeling? reflecting their intellectual (as opposed to emotional) humanism.
According to Bathgate, every sculpture is an experiment in response to an abstract opposed to pragmatic problem-it does not work towards a presumed result. From the point of view of the process, a finished work is not an end in itself but a place that one goes to.

In contrast to many of his contemporaries, Chris Bathgate?s use of metal is neither structural nor illusionistic. It does not refuse to transform the medium, and it does not play on the medium?s opposites, e.g. lightness from metal?s weight, or organic forms from its rigidity.
Bathgate?s process most closely resembles that of a machine builder or engineer. In the last two years, he has become increasingly involved in using mathematical techniques. This has allowed him to achieve the high degree of precision necessary for assembling such intricate works (these sculptures are not cast). The result is indeed a transformation-the pieces fit together in such a way that they cease to appear man-made, and yet in spite of this lack of bumpiness or personal touch emanate a presence that is unmistakable and engaging.
Bathgate?s entities are like instances of a foreign intelligence. Being uninhibited by pretensions to flesh, these sculptures call a type of ?creature feeling? reflecting their intellectual (as opposed to emotional) humanism.
According to Bathgate, every sculpture is an experiment in response to an abstract opposed to pragmatic problem-it does not work towards a presumed result. From the point of view of the process, a finished work is not an end in itself but a place that one goes to.

MY PROCESS

There is nothing inherently new about machine work itself. Some of the processes I use have been around for well over a century. Even the more modern types of machines I use, such as Computer Numerical Controlled or CNC machine tools, have existed in some form or another in industry for many decades. There are however a great number of aspects to my work and process that make it a solidly contemporary affair. The main one being the integration of new technologies that allow one to both simulate, simplify and scale down modern manufacturing practices to bring them off of the factory floor and into the studio. In this way, they become both financially accessible to individuals, and also flexible enough to be adapted to the needs of artists seeking to find expression through direct interaction with tools and processes previously off limits to the arts.
Advances in electronics, combined with a growing community of people with an interest in open source robotics and motion technologies, have helped produce an environment encouraging low cost, off the shelf solutions for building custom robotics and digital interfaces. In turn, these advances have led to an explosion of artistic uses for these new tools, from purely digital concepts that interpret and represent data itself in interesting new ways, to Artist who create purpose-built robots that are themselves integrated into installations or original works. They may also use such technologies behind the scenes, using homemade 3D printers of all types and sizes to create a wide range of new sculptural works. In my case, I employ new technologies in order to convert relatively inexpensive import equipment into fully functioning, multi-purpose, computer-operated machine tools that mimic many of the more inaccessible machining processes of industry. My goal is to see how these technologies may be used to explore formalistic concepts surrounding their use, and its impact on decisions about form. Such as exploiting the relationship between symmetry and precision, or trying to reconcile the logistics and mathematics involved in the medium with a more intuitive and free associative approach to sculpture.
I have spent the last decade researching and learning how to use all manner of machine tools and equipment. I taught myself how to construct, program, and operate a good number of robotic machine tools, many of my own design. These tools are as much works of art in my mind as the sculptures they help produce.

These experiences have not only taught me practical engineering skills, but have also led to an understanding that form and function are intimately linked, and that the various processes involved can be mined directly to find creative expression. Rather than simply functioning as a vehicle for conveying external thoughts or ideas, I have found there is a lot I can learn about my own personal aesthetic just from trying to bend my sculptural ideas through the lens of this highly quantitative medium. A medium where all ideas and designs must be expressed through absolute, definable shapes and dimensions. Shapes that are then crafted with a precision that is beyond the detection of the human eye, often accuracy is held to just a few thousandths of an inch, which leaves little room for estimation. The processes I employ to make my work encompass so many different spheres of knowledge and disciplines that I have rarely needed to look very far to find new and interesting ideas to explore.

But I have often struggled in conversation to articulate the exact way in which I find my inspiration. It is not easy to sum up the many technical, logistical, and conceptual situations that I must attend to in parallel while building a sculpture and how this dynamic informs my creative life. It is always easier for me to show rather than tell when it comes to explaining how I find some of my ideas, so I have included this section to hopefully let others get a glimpse of the many types of stimuli that inhabit the workshop where I make my sculptures. There is a lot of visual currency in these pictures and I hope that they will help illustrate the origins of some of my creative instincts.