Exploring creative intersections: Ernest Edmonds and his time-based generative art

Abstract

This article focuses on the experience of British artist Ernest Edmonds and the influences that have informed his art practice in the past forty years. How are these influences connected? The article has an historical focus. It develops the themes within Edmonds's art and shows his connections with the ‘Systems’ artists and their forebears. In particular, the article concentrates on the encounter of Edmonds with artistic thinking about systems and process in the broad sense, as well as digital and interactive work developed from the early 1980s. As the article will demonstrate, a passion for colour, time and structure, the encounter with a number of artists inspired by Constructivism in the early 1980s, and the educational context in which Edmonds has worked from the late 1960s until the present, have offered great opportunities of interdisciplinary exchanges and ideas that had a profound impact upon the nature of his art. These influences have enabled Edmonds to explore new constructs in art through the use of technology that are a constant stimulus in his creative research, both as an artist and as an academic.