Archie Brooks’s work investigates the interplay between organic materials and kinetic motion, creating
sculptures that challenge viewers’ perceptions of rhythm, repetition, and the human connection to ourselves
and natural cycles. Utilising wood as a primary medium celebrated for its tactile warmth, sustainability, and
connection to nature. Brooks contrasts its organic qualities with mechanical, often frustratingly repetitive
movements.

His sculptures are imbued with tension and ambiguity, reflecting on themes of effort, failure, and persistence. In one piece, a hammer endlessly swings toward a bronze casting of an enlarged kidney stone, but always misses, mirroring his own struggle with Cystinuria. Another alternately conceals and reveals a live feed of the viewer, exploring the dynamics of surveillance, visibility, and self-observation. Other works juxtapose delicate forms, such as feathers, with mechanisms that inevitably destroy them, speaking to the fragility of beauty and the cycles of decay and renewal.

The audience and the artwork react to each other, time spent with the piece changes it, engaging viewers in a dialogue about impermanence, futility, and our own self awareness. By merging traditional materials with
dynamic motion, his work embodies the tension between organic life and mechanised systems, offering a
thought-provoking meditation on the rhythms and contradictions that define human existence and the
environment we inhabit.

"My work creates dialogues between the spectator and the artwork, as a means of inducing introspection and self awareness. I create spaces that invite the viewer into the artwork as they become entangled with the installation. I am using this increased critical awareness to focus on people and their present experience. Their movements are mimicked on the screen or their sounds become the noise from the speaker. Their present existence is utilised and displayed to them from an outside perspective, allowing the flow of time to feel more material when visual reference points of yourself through time are recreated on the screen. I am creating spaces which encourage people to be introspective and exist momentarily in an act of self reflection. This presence in the moment is necessary and often hard to find. My work attempts to enforce this state of mind, visually showing new vantage points to induce self-observation and raise questions."