Negative Space Chess Set
Stefan Gougherty (Oakland, CA) is an industrial designer. As an only child growing up in the Arizona desert, he found entertainment through his tinkering hands and curiosity. Enjoying working with his hands has taken him to what he is today. Even though he designed Bluetooth headsets in Silicon Valley which later led him into the field of wearable tech, where he worked for Google on future versions of Glass, he was missing the open ended possibilities of art and the satisfaction of the hand made, brought him back to graduate school. In 2020 he graduated with a master's degree in metalsmithing from SUNY New Paltz.
After a lifetime of working with his hands, "I have finally found my craft," he says.
His specialty now is wearable art, like making unique and custom jewelry, sculptures and one of a kind objects, crafted with precision and a healthy dose of humor (check his site).
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Stefan's technical background offers him an unconventional and broad palate to draw upon for his art.
Stefan believes that the best ideas cannot be thought up, rather they are discovered, most often by accident! That is exactly what my three-part Chess Lyricists vs Chess Physicists is dealing with. The first part discussed how fast intuition and inspiration work together with slow logic and reasoning — two worlds of the unconscious and conscious. In what follows in Part 2 you are going to see how that instinctive and no-thinking part of brain made all great inventors in science (not only in arts where we are ready to accept it) jump to their discovery.
And this is precisely what Stefan says, "ideas cannot be thought up, rather they are discovered, most often by accident!" Of course, it is not quite by an accident, as our unconscious is working behind the scenes all the time and the creative process just ends up a longer period of "internal" deliberation of mind that we are not aware of at all. A
"My goal as an artist is to try and coax beauty into existence while taking a backseat, allowing nature to drive the process."
And now back to chess and how all the above applies to Stefan's case. As a curious mind, he has taken the classic chess set and turned it on its head with his project called Negative Space Chess Set.
After thinking about the traditional chess pieces he left his brain to brew his ideas in the underworld of mind for some time. And then, one day it popped up! He came up with his Negative Space idea according to which each chessman becomes an abstracted version of itself. Below, from left to right, are Pawn, Rook, Knight, Bishop, Queen, and King.
The interiors of acrylic cubes were machined out to create voids that reference their particular chess piece. The voids were then painted making hollow tubes of color in either yellow or black.
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Amazing and inspirative work of Stefan Gougherty!
