Artist Statement

Tom Burtonwood's practice is rooted in systems, in the logic of rules, repetition, and the generative possibilities that emerge when constraints are applied consistently over time. Working across drawing, sculpture, installation and animation, he produces works that orbit a philosophy of contingency: objects and images that are simultaneously governed by a set of instructions and open to interpretation.

At the center of his current work is an investigation of multi-stable perception, the way a form can hold multiple readings at once, shifting between states depending on how it is observed. His ongoing project A Cube is a Rectangle takes the Würfel, a simple geometric motif derived from the isometric cube, as its generative engine. Through accumulation, hundreds of drawings arranged in grids, sculptures that unfold and reassemble, stop-frame animations that show the cube's transformation, he explores how repetition and variation reveal complexity rather than reduce it.

He is drawn to the fold as both a physical and philosophical operation. Following Deleuze's conception of the Baroque fold, a fold within a fold, his sculptures and drawings accumulate layers of meaning, each iteration adding depth without resolution. Not depth as a failure of fidelity, a representation that almost but never quite arrives at its original, nor depth as a failure of argument, a meaning that opens and opens without closing, but depth as a condition. The necessary incompleteness that keeps the work alive to interpretation, the way the isometric cube refuses to settle no matter how long or how closely you look.

Movement, pattern, and recursion are not decorative choices but structural ones: they mirror how cognition itself works, always assembling the world from incomplete and shifting information. His work exists at the intersection of image-making and systems thinking, informed by a long engagement with digital fabrication, open-source culture, and networked production. Whether a drawing made by hand or an object produced through 3D printing, each piece belongs to a series, a set, a logic — and each asks what it means to make something that is simultaneously singular and endlessly reproducible.