Jacob Stanley Lambert

Jacob Stanley Lambert is a multidisciplinary artist and designer but this was not always the case.

Spending the majority of his twenties in various nondescript office jobs, his time performing laborious, often nonsensical tasks felt unending. with a bit of perspective, these swathes of time weren’t wasted, he was exercising his imagination, the years accrued in these atmospheres actually sharpened his ability to envisage new worlds and possibilities. at 26, he made the categorical decision to pursue a creative life, Jacob spent the next three years studying 3D Design & Craft at the University of Brighton which pushed him into the physical world of creation and exploration. During his time at BA every project was approached in a methodical research-lead manner, the pieces & projects from this period demonstrated the level of theoretical and conceptual matched with a practical hands on approach to creation.

His graduating year was unfortunately 2020, Jacob finished his degree he had enjoyed so thoroughly in a rather sorry state, no degree show and without truly completing his final pieces. This is in part why pushing forward into the masters programme at the RCA felt right. The RCA has always been the pinnacle of art and design education and knowing the calibre of alumni from Design Products specifically, this course was my first and only choice.

1st Class Degree 3D Design & Craft University of Brighton

MOO DESIGN IDENTITY AWARD New Designers 2020: Runner Up

2023: Robin and Lucienne Day Foundation Award: Runner Up

Jacob's work emanates from the broad themes of nature, man, and technology. These primal, churning, guttural forces of the earth which, in the modern world, have become almost indistinguishable. Magnifying further, Jacob's projects are concentrated around the concept of high-tech fabrication tools and processes being taken and brought back to the primitive and handmade. thus, bringing an element of imperfection to these clean and often clinical methodologies, specifically 3D scanning & 3D printing. the collision between primitive methodologies and high-tech, future-facing fabrication is the territory of my practice, The interconnectivity betwixt & between is where he finds his inspiration. Contrasts, opposites, clashes, and incompatibilities. Mashing the old and the new, construction and destruction, positive and negative spaces. unearthing deep truths and antiquated knowledge. feeding the hunger for spaces, voids, and objects of a new, contradictory, primitive hyper-lo-hi-tech typology of confounding form and properties.

This project started in many cases from an unresolved or unrealised idea stemming back years. I wanted to use the principles of 3D printing but do it differently. This process started with stable layering materials like paper, cardboard, foam board and polystyrene but I wanted to push the process further and see if you could create a 3D-printed object from a hole in the ground and let the earth act as the mould. So, I started as you might imagine, digging a hole in the ground where I found something which would change the project entirely. A Roman coin.

The coin brought me down the road of research into Roman Britain and the ancient world and material innovation. The discovery brought context to the project in another way. I was digging the hole in a town called Harlow. Harlow is a new town constructed in post-war Britain with futuristic utopian ideals sold as a product. Modern Harlow in many ways mirrors Modern Britain, a dilapidated husk of an idea, underfunded and poorly expanded., littered with ill-judged new builds and shopping complexes.

Now that I had context, modern and ancient Britain I had the tools in order to create the form. I decided to merge the ancient and the modern into a vertical ascendency. The process itself was fraught with trial and error. Roman Concrete was used to create the form, the secrets of which had only been recently discovered. The process itself created a stratified Neo-Roman hybrid object made from and of and in its place.

This process is the culmination of several years of projects in and out of education. The merging of the ancient and the modern is a trope I continually gravitate towards; the ideas of technology being reversed and deconstructed is the area I will be moving forward with post-masters.

Medium:

furniture

Manual High Tech

This project came from a brief whereby students were encouraged to interrogate production lines and fabrication processes in order to identify an area where the idea of the imperfect in an object, an environment, or an experience could be introduced.

I was immediately drawn to high-tech methods of creation, specifically 3D printing, and 3D scanning. During my 3D Design and Craft degree, I worked on a series of projects including rotations in Wood, Metal, Polymers, Digital, and Ceramics. In the final year of my degree, I embarked upon a digital project which opened my eyes to the limitless possibilities of computational design alongside robotic fabrication.

3D printing alongside 3D scanning are the modern tools for modern practitioners. I wanted to use the tenets of these typologies but in order to infuse these often stale, results-driven tools with an identity of authorship I wanted to go back.

This process of manual scanning came from these initial ideas, the creation of the project came from a dedication to the handmade. The tree from which the branches that were used had fallen down after being struck by lightning, so the branches were sawn, and transported to the university where they were assembled without power tools into rudimentary furniture. The chair was then punctuated with welding anchor points for the cable to run through, the steel cable was then welded together. The chair was then brought to a fire and burnt which exemplifies the former shape, the imperfections of the scan are forgotten, and the wooden legs are but a memory.

The project reflects on history, craftsmanship, adhocism, memory, technology, and rich materiality wedded to archaic and primitive forces.