Miles Halpin Art for Sale and Sold Prices

b. 1965 -

Born in Manchester in 1965 Halpin lived on the moors near Blackburn from 1971 and is self taught as a sculptor. He has been involved in a number of projects including running and exhibiting at the Broad Street Gallery Nottingham^working with the Groundwork Trust and English Nature on public arts and events creating larger pieces for the Hebden Bridge Sculpture Trail in Yorkshire. He also exhibited at The Art Attack Project in Hoxton Square London.
It's been useful to ally all three forms of expression and I think/hope that each reinforces the other. For me they all these different expressions originate in the same place - the pictures are of things that may show you how I see the world - the things I tend to notice, the highlights of my experiences in the visual world - these are the things that make me think of sculptures as an extension of the world, filling in the missing blanks.( I remember being quite shocked when someone first described my sculptural work as "abstract"... I had always thought of it as being directly representational.) On the other hand sometimes the pictures are just of things that pleased me or that I thought were striking images - the pictures perhaps most obviously in this category would be the "screamers" series of photos. They always make me feel something strong but I wouldn't say they inform any of my other work.
The pictures are often of small things close-up, things one might normally miss, and I especially like images where you can't really tell what it is; its size and nature. In particular, I find the silt pictures like this - some of them remind me of views from planes at 30,000feet (especially the Australian interior ) rather than four feet from the ground. "as above - so below". I've developed a bit of a thing for cracked roads and tarmac, and I found that even small grubby things can be enchanting with a bit of digital magic; click a button and suddenly the most startlingly beautiful landscapes appear. I like the beauty in mundanity, or is it the mundanity of beauty? the fact that actually we are utterly surrounded by beauty; that we bathe in oceans of it and yet sometimes are so unaware of its small intrusions into life.

Part of the joy of making the photographs has been an awakening of that sense of ubiquitous beauty.

Which segues me nicely into talking about the music.... I now find myself going everywhere with a camera for all the small and wondrous sights of the world, and a small voice recorder for all the small and wondrous sounds. There's not much that I miss these days.(it would be great, if overwhelming, if there was such a thing as a smell recorder). And all these noises add up to being the soundtrack to the story of life, the background music to Being. There's all sorts of sounds in the music - lots of them are from my workshop which is where I make most noise, but many are from elsewhere in the world: theres a factory chunking away in Tasmania, there's crows in the trees, children in playgrounds, ice on ponds, trams in the city. Also I have bashed and plucked and scraped and dragged my sculptures to get some of the noises - I even learned to play big sheets of steel like a violin with a 6ft steel bar. The music is an echo of the sounds of the shapes that I dream of and work with my hands, a shadow of the feelings associated with the sculptures.

I hope, then, that each expression somehow illuminates the others. Like some game of aesthetic Scissors, Paper, Stone; each can be both subsidiary and primary in its relationship with the others.


TECHNIQUES AND MATERIALS
To save repeating myself on every page, here's a few notes on the techniques and materials that I use.
Most of the sculptures are made from mild steel with some small inclusions of stainless steel. Generally these inclusions are behind small holes and gaps so that they reflect the world outside and include it in the work itself. The stainless steel inserts are sometimes heat-discoloured to give blues, oranges, yellows and reds. In the main picture above the orange colour is a stainless steel insert.
With the mild steel I generally polish it after construction to remove workshop dirt and scratches; then I may heat-blue it -see above- or use nitric acid to oxidise it to a bright, dry, orange colour. Sometimes I may grind the steel very thin and then beat it with a ball-hammer until it stretches and cracks - again see above. On completion, all steel surfaces (except oxidised) are protected using acrylic lacquer.
I have recently begun to use acrylic paints on top of the lacquer. This is a laborious process of up to 6 or 7 coats of very thin paint which is then sealed under another coat of lacquer.
Finishing on the surface is often by brushing with a rotary wire brush on a drill. By brushing areas in different directions I can create areas that are subtly different in appearance - you can see this in the picture above: around the grids of holes are shiny areas - these have been brushed at right angles to the rest of the surface. I make extensive use of this technique. Interestingly it changes as the viewer moves around the work - what is shiny from one angle can become matt from another. Also I often use pencil lines under the lacquer to help deliniate the brushed areas.
Another technique (which I now use only rarely) is to part-burn the lacquer to give a black finish to the surface. This is a good looking technique but the fumes given off smell like cancer so I try to avoid it these days, or just do it on windy days!
If there's anything more you want to know about these techniques please get in touch - I'm always keen to have a chat with people who get excited about metal.
well, that seems like a good place to stop for now.... just when you're wondering "what is he on about?"