>Ian Dawson

>PLAYTIME with Giulia Ricci, Ian Dawson and Nicky Hirst, Ubicua Gallery, London, 26 June – 22 Aug 2025

​With special musical commissions by Joseph Ijoyemi and Caroline Ross

PLAYTIME
Giulia Ricci, Ian Dawson, Nicky Hirst

With special musical commissions by Joseph Ijoyemi and Caroline Ross
Ubicua Gallery, London
26 June – 22 August 2025

PLAYTIME brings together three artists whose works blur the boundaries between image, structure, and instruction. Using sculpture and drawing as frameworks for potential performance, the exhibition invites viewers to consider each artwork as a kind of musical score—visual compositions open to interpretation, translation, and play.The show explores how visual forms can carry rhythm, notation, and expression—how a sculpture might act like a measure of time, or a drawing like a phrase to be sounded. Rather than offering fixed meaning, these works exist in a state of latent performance.

Artist and sound practitioner Joseph Ijoyemi created a new composition in response to Ian Dawson’s Brain Damage V3.1. The piece was developed entirely from recordings of 3D printers used in the making of the sculpture, transforming mechanical process into layered sound. The result is a richly textured sonic landscape that mirrors the sculpture’s internal logic—repetitive, glitchy, rhythmic, and full of quiet surprises. As the catalogue text notes: “The sound doesn’t just accompany the sculpture—it performs it, line by line.” This commissioned track received its first public airing during the exhibition opening and was later performed live by Ijoyemi, treating the sculpture itself as a kind of non-verbal score.

Writer and artist Caroline Ross responded to the exhibition through a series of live spoken word performances. Drawing on the exhibition’s themes of inscription, rhythm, and improvisation, Ross treated the artworks as graphic scores—visual prompts for poetic interpretation. Her compositions unfolded across time like the drawings and sculptures themselves: paced, layered, and rhythmically attentive. Performing live among the works, Ross translated visual gestures into language—creating a call and response between material form and voice.

Catalogue entry for: Brain Damage V3.1

Brain Damage V3.1 is a large-scale, twin-columned sculpture composed of 3D-printed scans of human, animal, plant, and machine forms. Statuesque in appearance, it functions more like a musical score—a composition that unfolds in space.
Both columns begin at floor level with a pair of oversized, swollen feet, laser-scanned and printed in PLA, a cornstarch-based bioplastic. From this shared foundation, two vertical structures rise and diverge, each holding a constellation of forms: a chimpanzee bust, a mouse heart, a pollen grain, flint slices, tree bark, and obsolete machine components. Their arrangement shifts with each iteration, forming an open composition—part improvisation, part archive.
Each form is printed from a digital scan sliced into thin horizontal layers. This additive process constructs the sculpture not through mass, but through accumulated silhouettes. Like a musical staff or a line of code, each layer carries a rhythm, a breath, a pause. The work echoes Friedrich Kittler’s insight that media systems fragment and reassemble thought through inscription.
The internal aluminum framework—barely visible—consists of four vertical rods that recall the staves of sheet music. These are not merely structural: they organize the work rhythmically, marking intervals and ruptures. In this way, the sculpture becomes what composer Cornelius Cardew called a “non-verbal notation”—a form to be interpreted, not resolved.
Sound by Joseph Ijoyemi accompanies the work, composed entirely from recordings of 3D printers during the sculpture’s making. The sound doesn’t merely accompany the object—it performs it, line by line.
Rather than telling a single story, Brain Damage V3.1 assembles fragments from different systems of knowledge—technical, botanical, biological, emotional. It asks what happens when materials don’t just represent knowledge but co-produce it. As theorist Karen Barad suggests, meaning and matter emerge together in mutual entanglement. What this sculpture offers is not meaning fixed in form, but meaning as encounter.
The version number—V3.1—hints at the work’s open-ended nature. It suggests a system in progress: a build assembled through iterations rather than final forms. Like a software patch or media file under constant revision, the sculpture resists closure. What we encounter is not a resolved object, but a versioned state—part memory, part malfunction, part update. As Pink Floyd sang, “There’s someone in my head, but it’s not me.” Brain Damage V3.1 stands at that threshold: a sculptural score—unfinished, fragmentary, and waiting to be read.


Ian Dawson:
Ian Dawson’s work explores transformation at the intersection of sculpture, 3D imaging, and additive manufacturing. His objects often appear to be in flux, as if emerging from constant material reconfiguration. Combining archaeological scans, body parts, and technological debris, he creates hybrid forms that move between digital and physical states. The plasticity of thermoplastic materials echoes the mutability of the digital files from which they’re derived.
Dawson’s practice is rooted in sculpture but extends into collaborative, research-led projects. He has worked with archaeologists to explore the creative potential of heritage imaging techniques, and recently collaborated with Compound 13 Lab in Dharavi, Mumbai, on 3D printing and plastic recycling. He is the author of Making Contemporary Sculpture (Crowood Press, 2012) and co-editor of Diffracting Digital Images (Routledge, 2021). His work has been widely exhibited, with solo shows in London, New York, and Paris, and is held in public and private collections internationally.

Joseph Ijoyemi:

Joseph Ijoyemi is a Swedish-Nigerian artist and sound practitioner based in London, whose work spans sculpture, installation, and music-driven composition. At the core of his practice is storytelling—an exploration of identity, memory, and emotion through both physical and sonic materials. Whether working with metal, found objects, or field recordings, Ijoyemi treats each project as a score, crafting resonant structures that are meant to be heard, felt, and experienced.
Originally trained as a painter, his journey into sculpture and sound emerged through collaborations with museums and archives, where the material weight of history and the emotional depth of objects reshaped his approach to making. Sound became an essential language in his work—layering rhythm, texture, and narrative into both sculptural and performance-based forms.
Ijoyemi is a 2025 finalist for the East London Art Prize.