 | Daytime drama
This simultaneously made series of sculptures, through constant handling divided slowly into punch lines. More image than weight, texture and material, each picture presents itself self-consciously within this group. The materials used; polystyrene, plaster, filler, primer, and gloss paint, involve a long process of building up layers and constant sanding. They are often juxtaposed with ‘bought’ objects that are, in comparison, quickly ‘acquired’. The result is a play between the value found in time and in material.
The work relies on the viewer’s recognition of familiar equations. The taller and smaller object, when paired, become a parent and a child, or an arm can be seen in a severed right angle. The curve is a recurring motif within the series, always revolving. Anthropomorphised, the curve can come to symbolise anything from disappointment and shame to strength and safety through a change in it’s rotation.
Whatever you do, don’t drop the baby (2008), is reminiscent of a fair ground game, where points can be won by throwing wooden objects into the arms of precariously balanced hooks, but beyond the colourful stripes there is also the red tape of a crime scene and a struggle to keep safe what is in ones care. First death (2008) has a similar mood. Two objects that would not be out of place in a blacksmith’s workshop, witness for the first time something more vulnerable than themselves.
The piece titled Witness (2008), continues this theme with an innocent but implicated onlooker witnessing a scene they were never supposed to see, while Moses down the Nile (2008), recalls the familiar story of the baby floating in a basket, seemingly aimless, but symbolically, anything but.
There is something cartoonish about much of the work. The objects defy our material experience, as if plucked from Photoshop or airbrushed into existence. Swallow those tears (2008) sees the curve at a suggestively shameful angle, a hung head, a cartoon character humiliated. With Untitled (2008), it’s almost as if the cartoonist has taken a break and a puff of air meant for an exhaust pipe has found itself hovering above a coffee cup.
With the sculpture Sinnlos Sweat (2008), meaning either pointless sweat or sweat without ‘sin’, we see objects ready for exercise with a drop of perspiration anticipating the exertion. On closer observation the ‘arm’ is lifeless and the ‘weights’ are unconvincingly weighty, suggestively pointing at gym culture and institutional exercise. Antibiotics (2008), drives at the dynamic between natural healing and man-made cures, though there is no value judgement here.
Jumpers for goal posts (2007), stands outside of the series, made almost a year earlier but remains very much within this dialogue. Here we see objects that, if we reduced ourselves to their size, would seem intimidating, perhaps even menacing with their wide spread legs and stocky builds but returning to our superior adult height they appear at once sweet and naive.
The closeness to home that many of these sculptures retain and the often-comic depiction of more serious themes places the work firmly in the everyday drama of the domestic.
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