Lebensformen (forms of life) is a suite of photographed sculptures derived from Friedrich Fröbel’s gifts (Fröbelgaben), nineteenth-century educational children’s timber blocks designed to teach geometric form, mathematics and creativity.

Fröbel used the term Lebensformen to describe the gift’s formal exercises for each corresponding set. These ‘formal studies’ were abstracted representations of structures from then contemporary life, for example, city arches, monuments, shooting stands, churches, tombstones, wells and shafts. Yet the examples Fröbel offered have strange correspondences equally to our contemporary world, both overtly and subliminally, while latently invoking Foucauldian architectural archetypes/structures of power, exclusion and representation.

The original gifts comprised of six different sets in varying size and complexity. I have concentrated on using the fourth gift in the series: eight identical 10 x 5 x 2.5cm rectangular blocks (a ratio of 1:2:4). Each block must be used in each of Fröbel’s exercises or figures.

Common concrete blocks were chosen by virtue of their almost identical ratio to the petite blocks of the fourth gift. Importantly, this choice was both material and scalar, which in turn offers a meditation upon the works of Carl Andre and Robert Smithson. However, the works are two-dimensional pieces, photographs; references to the assembly of the sculptures, their process – concrete debris, the residue of scraping aggregate and dust – are left within the images.