>Ian Dawson

>New Face in Hell, 2026, 3D-printed PLA on aluminium section, 210 × 35 × 35 cm

Notes on New Face in Hell
The work occupies an unstable position between three related forms: column, staff, and mast. It has the vertical authority of a column, the handled logic of a staff, and the infrastructural posture of an aerial or antenna. Each of these readings pulls the work in a different direction. The column brings with it histories of monumentality and ornament; the staff suggests support, measurement, and movement; the mast introduces ideas of signal, reception, and exposure. Rather than resolving into one of these categories, the sculpture holds them in tension.
Unlike the seamless repetition associated with Brancusi’s Endless column  this work insists on interruption. Its structure is visibly assembled: segments meet and colours shift. The joints are not disguised. Continuity is not assumed but negotiated. The column does not aspire to transcendence or infinity; it foregrounds its own construction and the labour required to keep it upright.
At first encounter, the work may read as a patterned or decorative sequence, akin to a highly ornamented baroque column, which historically compressed theology, power, and cosmology into surface. Here, ornament becomes a way of compressing information and history. Repetition, symmetry, and surface complexity produce a visual richness that feels almost excessive. Processes of making the object—scanning, slicing, mirroring, extrusion—are condensed into surface and form. Ornament operates not as symbol or rhetoric, but as a way of holding information rather than communicating meaning.
Several repeating elements are derived from a portrait of Albert Einstein incorporated into the vertical sequence at varying levels of abstraction these are stacked alongside sections translated from scanned pine tree trunks, abstracted forms from Whitby Abbey, extruded patterns from the The National Archives and sand formations from the English coastline. Einstein is not approached as a heroic figure; instead, his image is treated as residue—a fragment of a way of thinking that has already fractured. The head becomes a module, repeated and displaced. Identity gives way to pattern. What remains is less a likeness than an afterimage of knowledge distributed along the length of the work. Einstein’s recognisability matters, but only insofar as it is unstable. The mirrored profiles create interference rather than representation. The face becomes visual noise, a repeated signal that never resolves into a single viewpoint. In this sense, Einstein functions as a problem—an index of the moment when certainty gave way to probability, and when knowledge became inseparable from its consequences.
This logic extends to the sculpture’s reading as an aerial or antenna. The staff behaves as a receiver rather than a transmitter. Its vertical posture suggests listening, interception, and attunement rather than instruction or broadcast. Ring-like elements and abrupt material transitions resemble couplings, insulators, or calibration points. The work appears tuned rather than expressive. It does not send a message; it holds itself open to signal, interference, and accumulation.
The sculpture also carries a totemic quality, though without belief or cosmology. It gathers references—scientific, historical, cultural—without reconciling them into a coherent system. This is a post-belief totem, assembled from incompatible times and materials. In this sense, it aligns obliquely with Aby Warburg’si dea of the afterlife of images: forms persist not by remaining intact, but by mutating, repeating, and resurfacing in altered contexts.
Colour throughout the work operates indexically rather than expressively. The palette recalls engineering plastics, industrial coatings, and calibration markers more than painterly choice. Colour functions as tagging or separation, marking transitions between processes and components. This reinforces the sense that the sculpture is a working object, even if its work is ambiguous. It sits between tool and relic, between use and display.
Formally, New Face in Hell continues an engagement with post-indexical practice. There is no original form to return to, only translations: scans of sculptures, mirrored fragments, extruded prints, and reassembled units. Repetition here is not redundancy but labour—an act of staying with material through small decisions and adjustments. The beaded logic of the structure foregrounds sequence, care, and persistence, allowing coherence to emerge gradually rather than being imposed.
The title, New Face in Hell, names the condition the work inhabits. Taken from an early song by The Fall the phrase reads as a flat statement rather than a metaphor or narrative. It suggests arrival into something already operating, already damaged, already indifferent. The sculpture is not positioned as a solution, monument, or warning, but as something newly assembled that must persist within an existing and unstable field.

>New Face in Hell, 2026, 3D-printed PLA on aluminium section, 210 × 35 × 35 cm