margin gallery artist eric h steele

I am concerned with how life relates to the built environment. The fluid, conscious, idiosyncratic, organic world co-exists and interacts with the more inflexible, systematic, organized structures of machines, cities and infrastructure. We have created the built environment that now envelopes us, shapes us as we shape it, interacts with us and affects us as much as we it.

Emotion butts up against hard-edged structure, evolving forms of life against unchanging engineered structures and processes, idiosyncratic against rule-based-ness, dual aspects competing and cooperating, influencing each other in an endless process of building and rebuilding, evolving and developing.

I like to work in steel because it is the quintessential material of the engineered built environment but also the most malleable and forgiving of materials. When heated steel melts and flows and takes on almost infinite shapes, textures and surfaces. If heat is a symbol for emotion and the force of life, it transforms the hard reality of cold steel and all that symbolizes. Man shapes and alters and is shaped and altered by the structures of steel he has invented and built. And all growing things interact with and affect those structures.

-Eric H. Steele