Shane Charles is a sculptor working with steel, clay, and timber to examine how bodies register time through material consequence. His work uses somatic activation—breath, pressure, labor—to initiate chemical and structural processes that continue without the body present. Corrosion, fracture, and load function as evidentiary systems rather than symbols, allowing material history to carry record forward.
His practice draws from Eastern Woodlands land-based knowledge, post-industrial labor economies, and surveying logics, treating pattern, structure, and behavior as archival mechanisms. The sculptures operate as delayed encounters: the viewer arrives at the trace of action, witnessing duration and consequence.
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This work treats the body as an initiating variable rather than a subject. Breath, pressure, and labor introduce change into material systems—oxidation, fracture, deformation—that continue independently of the body’s presence. Agency transfers quickly from performer to matter.
Material behavior governs the work. Steel corrodes according to its chemical composition and exposure; clay fractures along mineral and compression lines formed over geologic time; wood shifts in response to grain, moisture, and load. These processes are not expressive or symbolic. They follow embedded rule sets.
The sculpture records outcome rather than action. Viewers encounter the work after the initiating event has passed, reading alteration as evidence. In this delayed condition, witness becomes forensic and material functions as an archive—holding memory, labor, and trace as structural consequence rather than representation.
studioshanecharles@gmail.com
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