Desiring Machine is a fallen tree/tower lying by the roadway. It is a crashed relic of machine-age desire putting down new roots into the earth and unfurling tendrils from it’s architectonic radii and sections. To motorists speeding past it is an indeterminate blur, a silhouetted filigree that might be a decaying windmill or other piece of obsolete agricultural machinery – a relic of the struggle of humans to co-exist with nature.

The cause of this optical confusion is a vegetal motif, a floral border from a 19th century pattern book that has been adapted to form the base unit of the modular system of this sculpture which is composed of three repeated modular units generated from the ‘original’ pattern. Desiring Machine’s recursive plant-like structure unfolds from a single stem five units long that branches into four stems, three units long which in turn branches into nine stems, two units long and finally branches into sixteen stems, each one unit long.

It is too mechanical and perfectly symmetrical to be a tree and it is too ornate to be an industrial artefact. In Desiring Machine a collision of abstraction and ornamentation is played out. It appears vaguely utilitarian, logical; it could have been left behind by the road builders or be a collapsed electricity pylon. If so, its structural logic is obscured by intense ornament as if it had been infected by net curtain, lace doily or other item of domestic frippery. These stereotypical oppositions are a playful critique of various forms of techno-industrialism that have objectified nature as passive and mechanical, a ‘thing’to be controlled and made useful.

Paradoxically, Desiring Machine suggests a pre-modern, Aristotelian conception of nature as an animate plurality filled with purpose and desire.”