The sculptures of Mel Kendrick are remarkably various: they twist and rotate and pulse as engaging experiments in positive and negative space. From the start of his career, in the early 1970s, Kendrick has taken a strong interest in piecing together parts and planes of wood, sometimes painting his work to accentuate the relationship between the extant elements building the composition and the empty spaces their cutting out left behind. Greatly taken with the process of making things, in the hopes of demonstrating not only the attractiveness of form but also the philosophical understanding of creating shapes and parallel openings, he cuts and builds marvelously intricate works that reflect on the consequences of their own being and building. As he has said, “I became interested in the idea that an object could define itself, be completely self-referential.”* The innate self-containment of the works is enlarged and explored as an illustration of the imagination. Kendrick comments, “My pieces are self-referential; they are models of the thought process. I arrived at this way of working when I stopped drawing altogether. I wanted my decision-making very much evident in the pieces themselves.”
