As the Crow flies.

Martin Looker, France

Martin Looker was born in Yorkshire, a northern region the United Kingdom, in 1956. He has spent the majority of his life as a malaria researcher in UK Universities. In 1992 he moved along with his wife to live and work in France as a gardener. Martin has made sculptures of one sort or another for the majority of his adult life. Latterly he has chosen to concentrate his artistic efforts on Sculpture, in particular abstract sculptures. These sculptures reflect the artists desire to remove all the unnecessary elements of a found item and to manifest its very essence in a transformed , abstracted way. Found objects are discovered in gardens and farm fields, scavenged from the local dump, buried in old stone barns or picked up along a forest path or riverbank. His work reflects a fascination with texture: a weathered lump of ancient oak, the patina of old bone or rusted metal, the delicate surface of a spelled eggshell. He has a preference to use natural materials and his penchant towards rust ;leads to the discovery of unappreciated materials in plain sight. Man-made materials, in particularly Formica are often used to provide an interesting counterpoise to the natural elements. Invariably a found item will spark a concept to be cultivated into the final form of a sculpture, often accompanied by a whimsical, sometimes eccentric title.