1985
£120
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[tab:biography]Michael Binkley is a professional artist with 40 years experience working as a sculptor in a wide range of scale, stone type and idiom. His gallery and studio are located in the warehouse district of Squamish, Canada.
Binkley wants to reconnect individuals to their primal instinct of touch. The sensory experience of touch is quickly de-programmed in most of us during childhood. ‘Don’t touch’ is a phrase often spoken to a child during formative years, and we learn that it is almost taboo to touch objects. This imposed societal constraint pushes our desire to touch to a deep place within us and sculpture is one means to resurface that instinct. Stone sculpture is the oldest art form known to Man and if Binkley can entice a viewer to want to touch one of his sculptures, he feels he has succeeded in making a good art work.
When carving sculpture, he tries to pay as much attention to the finishing of the piece as he does to the design – different textures are integral to the piece itself, as it supports his desire to have people touch his work as part of their interaction with a particular piece.
In our contemporary world of ‘conceptual art’ as popular art form, Binkley believes there is a missing piece that dismisses line and form, positive and negative space and composition of a discrete sculpture, which is truly valuable in aiding an individual’s interaction with art through touch.