We now have access to extraordinary machines for manufacturing, and cheap materials which can (in large cities at least) be obtained from department stores. Why, then, does it sometimes seem that hardware is being homogenized to a few form factors: the slim, seamless, round-cornered rectangle; The white oblong which could be a heater, a toaster, a refrigerator?The promise of steam punk which once seemed the inevitable future in an age of ever more empowered garden shed tinkerers seems to have been thwarted by the counter forces of CAD and injection moulding.

At Goya Curtain, Sadgrove will present several examples of a shoddier, more idiosyncratic future where cheap materials and cheaper skills collide to produce sound-making objects whose uniting aesthetic is expedience. Over the past decade, Sadgrove has produced a number of mechanical and electronic instruments made from just a few materials which are easy for an amateur to source and mill. Aluminium bodies, brass strings (straight out of a guitar string packet) and steel screws holding it all together. The work, such as it is, represents an amalgam of New Zealand-born garden shed tinkering with the casual access to materials only Tokyo can provide.

About Mark Sadgrove

Born in 1978, and raised north of Auckland, New Zealand, Sadgrove allowed a childhood crush on elementary particle names to develop into a full-on relationship with Science. He currently finds himself being a passable Associate Professor in nanophotonics at Tohoku University in Sendai. While his machining skills have never advanced much past crude highschool metalwork, neither has his imagination atrophied in the intervening years, factors which shaped the objects to be displayed in Al;Cu;Fe.