Stephen Ormandy x Heckler for Culture Vault
Stephen Ormandy x Heckler for Culture Vault
Culture Vault is excited to have collaborated with renowned Australian artist Stephen Ormandy and acclaimed post-production studio Heckler towards their genesis collection ‘Alphabet’
Stephen Ormandy is a Sydney-based contemporary artist who works across painting, sculpture, and ceramics. His work is inspired by both the natural world and manmade design; throughout his practice, he maintains a strong commitment to the aesthetics of color and form. Often, the line, shape, and surface of Ormandy’s paintings are echoed in his sculptural work, and vice versa. The organically abstract, bright blocks of colour and curved geometry have an immediately recognizable quality about them. There is a mutual dialogue between the two mediums of Ormandy’s work, which bridges the gap between 2D and 3D. His work is held in multiple public collections across Australia and has been exhibited internationally at renowned institutions and galleries in Sydney, London, New York, and Paris. He is also the Creative Director of Dinosaur Designs, one of Australia’s leading design brands that specializes in fine-crafted jewelry and homewares.
For his genesis collection on Culture Vault, Stephen Ormandy has teamed up with award-winning special effects and post-production studio, Heckler. The resulting collection of NFTs consists of an alphabet of shapes in motion. In his traditional practice, Ormandy looks for sculptural opportunities within a shape, which he bends and turns through space until it takes its final form. This process is visually captured in the animations by Heckler, both in the 14 limited-edition alphabet 3D sculptures, and the two 1/1 3D sculptural animations ‘Big Bang’ and ‘Dark Matter.’ However, the collection extends beyond the works available in digital form. Collectors who own one of each of the limited edition ‘Alphabet’ NFTs will receive a physical sculpture of an ‘Alphabet’ piece of their choice, crafted by Stephen Ormandy. Just as Ormandy’s painting and sculptural practices close the gap between 2D and 3D, his genesis NFT collection exists in both the digital and physical worlds. This ‘phygital’ aspect of the collection positions it at the crossroads of tradition and innovation.
View the collection in a virtual 3D and VR gallery
The 1/1 animated NFT ‘Big Bang’ grew out of Ormandy’s hand-made sculpture ‘Citadel’, which was exhibited at Olsen Gallery, Sydney in 2014. The digital animation and sound effects, produced by Heckler studio, bring out the playful exploration of form in Ormandy’s sculptural practice as he searches for new iterations of shapes. The artist views the cube as a building block of creation, allowing him to take advantage of its plasticity as he molds and remolds it. But in this digital animation, the cube and its corners have burst wide open; Ormandy says they are “no longer bound by gravity.” The title ‘Big Bang’ suggests the original creation of the universe, and of order being created out of chaos. It echoes our constant search for meaning within symbols and shapes, especially in the alphabet of language. Ormandy suggests that in the endless expansion, contraction, and rotation of the shape, “an accidental explanation for the unknown lies in-between what we know.”
View and purchase the complete works here at Culture Vault