Batten & Kamp
Batten & Kamp Alexandra Batten and Daniel Kamp are a New Zealand-born duo based between Paris and Hong Kong. Since 2020 their practice has moved across functional sculpture, robotics, and installation, working in rock, steel, lava stone, neon, aluminium, and titanium. They make everything themselves, in a converted factory between a jungled mountain and a port on the edge of Hong Kong Island
Their work runs on two tracks at once. Half is about sheer presence: boulders bolted to chairs, a piano made of steel and stone, flowers rematerialised in titanium.
The other half turns against itself, robots that refuse their function, objects whose utility is deliberately undermined. A mountain containing the power for its own destruction. It's that second thread, the self-negating one, that sits closest to NOT.
They are represented by Carpenters Workshop Gallery, and were named leading emerging designers from the Asia Pacific region by Design Anthology in 2023. Their work is in the permanent collections of OMM Museum in Türkiye and private collections internationally.
You described your work as having two parallel lines, one half heavy and present, the other with a self-negating quality. How do these express themselves?
AB: Yeah that's right, the physicality of our work is heavy and present, it's often rock and steel and shear substance. But the ideas we are exploring very often occupy another time scale. I lost my mother a few months ago and so much of what I'm making, thinking and writing about is her absence. I find the void of her both acutely painful and incredibly fascinating.
AB: Yeah that's right, the physicality of our work is heavy and present, it's often rock and steel and shear substance. But the ideas we are exploring very often occupy another time scale. I lost my mother a few months ago and so much of what I'm making, thinking and writing about is her absence. I find the void of her both acutely painful and incredibly fascinating.
DK: I can't remember what I was on about with the self-negating thing but we are making a lot of work about volcanoes right now. For a while last year I was into watching live cams of volcanic eruptions. I would watch them instead of movies. It coincided with a stressful time and I think it was the sheer release of an eruption that felt therapeutic to me.
Right now we're developing a number of works using lava stone which I think is about weighing the insignificance of our little lives against the Volcanic activity that forms the world. One such piece is a cute/scary little robot who's only job is to hold a volcanic rock.
Is there something your work keeps returning to that you haven't fully explained, even to yourself?
Is there something your work keeps returning to that you haven't fully explained, even to yourself?
AB: Geomorphology - how land is shaped, deformed and reshaped endlessly. The fact that the Earth, which feels so present and sure, was born of collision and hellish molten oceans and volcanoes building landscapes and land masses splitting and cracking and fragile things growing from them. It's all so brutal but relieving too and optimistic.
AB: Geomorphology - how land is shaped, deformed and reshaped endlessly. The fact that the Earth, which feels so present and sure, was born of collision and hellish molten oceans and volcanoes building landscapes and land masses splitting and cracking and fragile things growing from them. It's all so brutal but relieving too and optimistic.
How much of what you make is meant to be understood, and how much is meant to be felt or left open?
AB: I think that's the simplest delineation between design and art. When we make a design, you should get it. When it's art, we hope you feel it. Our Steel and Stone Piano is, in fact, a piano.
You're interested in the digital world but also pretty critical of it. What does that criticism actually look like in the work?
DK: I wouldn't say that our work is especially critical of the digital world, more just that we are personally critical of its impact on our own lives. We use a lot of digital processes and are grateful for them but we are most interested in making physical things for the physical world. Our time is so full of doubt because the digital world is disorienting.
DK: I wouldn't say that our work is especially critical of the digital world, more just that we are personally critical of its impact on our own lives. We use a lot of digital processes and are grateful for them but we are most interested in making physical things for the physical world. Our time is so full of doubt because the digital world is disorienting.
The things we naturally use to determine the truth of something and where we stand in relation to it, are very hard to come by online. But if I climb a mountain I suddenly have very little doubt about what's real and what matters. So we want to make things that people can think and feel with in physical space, because humans have/are bodies, not just minds.
I hate Instagram so much, but trees are real nice to be around.
The things we naturally use to determine the truth of something and where we stand in relation to it, are very hard to come by online. But if I climb a mountain I suddenly have very little doubt about what's real and what matters. So we want to make things that people can think and feel with in physical space, because humans have/are bodies, not just minds.
I hate Instagram so much, but trees are real nice to be around.
Who were you making work for when you started, and has that changed?
AB: We were and are always making work for each other.
DK: Yeah, we are show-offs and we're in love, and we are incredibly blessed to be able to just show off to each other for a job.
