Kristaps Ancāns, in his own words.

I was born in 1990, and I would see things being built from scratch in countryside. The construction that I saw then has left a solid impact on me in terms of use of mechanics, metal and carpentry in my artistic practice.

I’ve always created objects, I grew up in area where I could easily access blue and red clay, and so as a child I would shape figures from these found materials. No one would teach me art at that stage, but I would mimic things that my older sister would do in school. I would recreate her drawing exercises and through the process of making understand the materials that I had.

I remember, that I was fascinated by flow of watercolour and I desperately wanted to understand how to control it. Later gouache came into picture and I attempted to imitate it through other materials and so would manifest myself in it. Currently, I often create my own materials or experiment with properties and limits of traditional materials, since existing materials are not always suitable in conveying the concepts that I work with. My goal is to look at material with minimal knowledge of how it would normally be used. So I can be free to experiment, especially when playing around with chemical processes and observing chemical reactions. These reactions impact my thinking, and the art that I create; in many cases I manipulate materials to the point of deformation and through this process I get acquainted with it.

To this day, I feel that I often look at my sculptures through lens of painting (Kristaps has BA in Painting from University of Latvia and MA in Fine Arts from Central Saint Martin's College of Art and Design), especially in my approach towards colour. As monotonous as it might seem in an object, the shape and structure of it often references painting, but more so to solve conceptual riddles.

An ever evolving conceptual game of relativity is my main area of interest. Significance of possibility, and the creation of game imbibed with its own artificial intelligence where formal values, physical laws and allusive references are all set in play is the essence of my work. That is my definition of absolute freedom, this possibility to step out of the system that one exists in. Disconcerting harmony. In art I create a possibility of leaving ones system, and recognising fractals of other possibilities. For me it is important to live through and acknowledge these possibilities and get lost in the fractals of this process.

I call my two dimensional artworks “surfaces”. I think it was important for me to break down this heavy terminus "painting" and understand what it is in two-dimensional work that is important for me and why I want to use it. I fill in the surface of a canvas and name it by calculation of that particular element in artwork, the flatness of the artwork, the flatness of text and technicality of titles opens another game of possibilities through their relationships.

Writing is crucial part of my artistic process for both 2d and 3d artworks that I create, I love to write. Language can be a completely dysfunctional tool, yet one can manipulate it and with it also the space, I consider it as another medium in my practice.

I consider artificial nostalgia the "food" of my practice. I find it curious, memories consist of images that we “photograph” in our mind and store in our unconscious. Artificial nostalgia, in a way, is a possibility of a memory. Our mind embellishes memories, so I think that I remember situations from my childhood, while in reality it is impossible since I was in an another room at the time. So imagination is shaped by artificial inputs, synthes is synthesised; yet that artificial feeling is where I find sources to reference in my art.

A kinetic object does things and is functional, yet I assign new function to it and then question what function it carries for our society.