The Beautiful Machined Metal Sculptures of
Chris Bathgate
Chris Bathgate is a self-taught machinist sculptor who was born in 1980 in Baltimore, Maryland. He still currently works and resides in Baltimore and has spent the last decade learning how to build and use a variety of metal working tools and machinery. He has assembled an elaborate machine shop of repurposed and home made machine tools, along with a multitude of other equipment and inventions in the basement studio of his Baltimore home.
His body of work is a collection of intricately machined metal sculptures that represent the combination of his unique metalworking style with a traditional approach to sculpture. By combining the math and logistics used in performing the complex tasks of modern machine work with a more emotive and aesthetic problem-solving ethic, Bathgate’s work shows that it is not creativity alone that drives human imagination, but also the need to solve and overcome problems that lead to inspiration. Be it through the necessity of his process or arbitrary guidelines set by the artist himself, each work becomes a creative response to a series of mathematical and subjective visual parameters. The result is a precise and other worldly art object that exudes a creative logic all its own.