Drummond Masterton (United Kingdom 1977)
“Terrain” (coffee cup), 2005
aluminium
selected by Tanya Harrod
We have to expand our vocabulary to engage with the work of Drummond Masterton. He is a young silversmith whose work explores the poetic possibilities of Computer Aided Design and Computer Aided Manufacture. He is conscious of the control that is exercised by the available softwares and Computer Numeric Controlled fabricating devices that are used by designers. Masterton’s approach is exploratory not functionalist. At times it is a little subversive. What we see here are two coffee cups and saucers. One is the prototype that has been printed out in layers of plaster. The other is the product. It has been milled out of aluminium using a Computer Numeric Controlled cutting machine. The Terrain cup is a mundane coffee cup with a mountain inserted inside the vessel which also functions as an interlocking mechanism between cup and saucer. The piece when in use appears as a perfectly ordinary cup, but after the user starts to drink the coffee the landscape inside slowly starts to reveal itself, making each successive drink more and more rewarding. Masterton liked the idea that the cup could reflect an image from your mind and set about to insert a landscape inside an ordinary cup. The cup and saucer were CAD modelled and then combined with a model of Ben Nevis by using a powerful Boolean function. He resolved the design through analysing prototypes of various solutions produced using a Rapid Prototyping machine. Masterton likes to explore the tension between the software on which he has created his design and the actual process of Computer Numeric Controlled cutting. He believes that artists should not rely on manuals in order to understand a particular software. They should, instead, discover and explore software and, if necessary, subvert it. It may be relatively simple to design a cup and saucer digitally. But it is not easy to introduce something as asymmetrical as a mountain. The cup and saucer are the prose. The mountain is the poetry.
Tanya Harrod, London
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