All Wright!

Reading Arnolfini CEO, Kate Brindley’s introduction to Daphne Wright’s solo exhibition, ‘Emotional Archaeology’ left me slightly surprised at the number of influences Wright’s work uses, “...the suburban and the domestic realm, also drawing upon references from art history, literature and film, to nonsense poetry and country and western music...” Brindley continues her intro in stating that through these references Wright, “offers us ways to think about difficult, often side-lined issues relating to class, aspiration, faith, parenthood, aging and care.” That’s a lot to process and leaves the sceptic in me wondering how many of these ideas Wright actually intended to be present in her work and how much of the aforementioned was Kate Brindley possibly over-outlining the ways of interpreting it? [Though it is important to note that this exhibition is in two halves, at Arnolfini and a National Trust property, Tyntesfield in North Somerset; this post focusing solely on the Arnolfini work]. Either way it points to the occupation for much of contemporary art as being ‘all encompassing’ or dealing with a wide range of ideas such as 'contemporary culture', whatever that is exactly? Whether it does this to make itself more accessible to audiences or give it an authority that ‘the establishment’ feels art needs in order to be credible or taken seriously I am unsure. What I will say however is that in writing about art I often worry about over analysing it as sometimes you miss the overall message; there’s a skill in being able to pick out themes in an artwork and another in being able to succinctly capture what it is about in only a few words. I’m still practising at both! In my stubbornness, I wanted to challenge that introduction a little and make my own conclusions about Daphne Wright’s work; so upon walking into the first room of the exhibition at Arnolfini and being confronted with an upturned, life-size flayed sculpture of a horse, a swan and monkey each in similar states of distress, one way or another, I was about to find out!

 

Stallion (2009) Marble dust and Resin.

From the beginning, the works in this exhibition clearly present themselves as being made by a highly skilled and competent sculptor interested in the nature of materials; this is an exhibition by an artist that, without wanting to dumb it down too much, ‘likes making’ (in other works upstairs it almost comes across as a kind-of 'thinking through the process of making'). The sculpture ‘Stallion’ in the first room; a life-size horse exquisitely cast from resin and covered in marble dust to give the effect of being entirely sculpted from marble whilst also mimicking a museum copied process. The whiteness of the marble against the theatrical red painted walls of the gallery creates for dramatic effect in what is the first of a series of contrasts throughout the exhibition used to create tension, anxiety or unease. The first piece that strikes you is the horse; it is an unusual perspective to see a horse from, yes it is distressing but in that infamous Andy Warhol, ‘car crash’ voyeuristic kind-of way it is also very interesting; even more so in context to its neighbours the hanging lamb, sickly monkey and flailing swan.

Lamb (2006) Marble dust, resin.

It is emotive, possibly all the more so for the animals various states being suspended in time, almost as if to prolong or scrutinise their situation. They play upon our understanding of myths; the powerful, heroic horse now fallen; the swan referring to the fallen young male in the Greek myth, Leda and the Swan’. Whether I would have picked-up on these specific references or not I did make the association between the portrayals of the animals as though museum sculpture in contrast to those ideals being presented in a much darker reality. The material and craftsmanship ignites a curiosity into the work before being repulsed or affected by the 'tragedy' of their situation.

 

That first room is where the animal theme begins and ends. Upstairs is a stylistically similar treatment of materials and shares with it a sense of conflict but is completely unexpected in content. A pot-plant made from unfired clay limply droops on the stairs to the upper gallery its sorry state reminiscent of a guilty truth of many whom will relate to the familiarity a neglected houseplant. The plant’s domesticity being more familiar than that of the horse, and in my opinion, more poignant in capturing the fragility between life and death. It is far more subtle. ‘Could this be what Wright’s work is about?’ I ask myself; ‘A reaction or set of emotive responses to these objects and their unusual materials?’ If so then the viewer’s conscious is pricked, pardon the pun, further in works such as ‘Where Do Broken Hearts Go?’ cacti made from tinfoil, into a sparse aluminium sci-fi desert complete with Country and Western songs. It is kind of tragic in its falseness and sense of melodrama. In a separate room Wright casts her two sons in jesmonite, they sit coldly and serenely on a family kitchen table in a part of the exhibition dedicated to children and child rearing. Here is also an unfired piece titled, ‘Clay Heads’ comprised of several free-standing naive faces with slits for eyes, their features unfinished or childlike again in attempt to use the material as a metaphor of both the malleable as well as fragility or vulnerability of childhood identity. If taken as a room unto itself it is quite interesting and you could draw a lot upon conversations of time, childhood and growing-up but for me personally, it is an idea touched upon in art and clay before (think Antony Gormley).

 

Still Life Plant (2014) Unfired clay.*

One of the most successful pieces in the exhibition for me, is ‘Domestic Shrubbery’ and takes the form of decorative Victorian plaster flowers, fauna and twisting branches that fill a room, floor to ceiling on every wall. Imagine a 3D version of William Morris wallpaper! What was once dismissively decorative now takes on a more constricting and sinister reality becoming an ensnaring cage of artificial nature than twee, idyllic country pattern. In some ways it is still quite beautiful from a craftsmanship point-of-view but I think the way that Wright subverts the domesticity and symbolism of nature used in that Victorian decoration and draws upon the wildness and threatening nature of those patterns into something that is altogether more confrontational. This was something designed to cause unease and if further proof was needed then hidden amongst the crisscrossing fronds is tiny shrivelled hearts accompanied by an eerie soundtrack of a woman’s voice making cuckoo calls. The heart’s make it a bit cliché and aren’t really needed but the presence of the cuckoo call is a reminder of the ‘cuckoo in the nest’ and the bird’s nature of laying its eggs in the nests of other birds. The viewer here is the outsider, the intruder in the nest both seduced by the inherent skill and beauty of the fragile casted decor and trapped by it at the same time.  It is the sort of work and space that changes your behaviour whilst you’re in it; a mixture of carefulness and curiosity. For these reasons it is one of the few pieces that best fits the following description, I read online about her work; “Wright’s art is the result of a relentless curiosity into the way in which a range of materials can create an involvement with often unspoken human preoccupations.”

 

Domestic Shrubbery (2009) Plaster, sand and spoken word.

After seeing the exhibition it raises an important issue for me with Wright’s work, in that it is hard to pin down to a single set of ideas or theme and instead of having one clear message it has several. People will go away remembering pieces from ‘Emotional Archaeology’, the horse, the lamb, the wallpaper, the monkey, but the link between the, ‘what was this all about?’ was more woolly when viewing the exhibition as a whole. Neither is there a huge amount of information about the artist to provide clues so you are left only with the work on display. Content-wise it is quite fragmented to piece together though an attempt to link the work comes through in the concept of archaeology derived in the exhibition title. If archaeology is taken to mean ‘the study of human activity through the recovery and analysis of material culture’ then the exhibition does take material culture of the home and references to childhood or Westerns in pop-culture and analyses how these themes can be reconstructed in tinfoil, clay or film and during that process new ideas are discovered that subvert our original understanding of that culture. Though more considerable effort and imagination is required to link pieces such a ‘Swan’ and ‘Primate’ to an ideas of the museum, myths and archaeological practices. I do not want to get too hung up on exhibition titles but in this case I was looking to the title for more guidance as to what Daphne Wright’s work was all about, it almost felt like it was trying to say too much and was possibly in danger of saying nothing at all. The exhibition's curator, Josephine Lanyon likens Wright's process of making work to that of emotional archaeology, "uncovers truths in the process of reproducing our contemporary culture." Whether those truths were about life, death, guilt, relationships, I am unsure? And I still do not know why you would necessarily go looking for anything truth seeking or meaningful in wallpaper without a reason I seem to be missing. If all of the above then the exhibition felt like a sweeping statement rather than a close look in depth at any one of those ‘truths’. It felt a little bit clichéd. Essentially there are many great parts in this exhibition but, perhaps like archaeology there are many gaps as there are answers, I’m just not sure about the whole.

 

Daphne Wright ‘Emotional Archaeology’ is on at The Arnolfini until December 31^st. http://www.arnolfini.org.uk/whatson/daphne-wright-emotional-archaeology



 

*Sourced from http://artaddict.net/events/article/2592/daphne-wright-frith-street-gallery

The City & The City

“The catalogue of forms is endless: until every shape has found its city, new cities will continue to born. When the forms exhaust their variety and come apart, the end of cities begins.”*

 

‘Objects-Models-Proposals’ is the title of the latest exhibition of Graham Seaton’s work with accompanying collaborations by Rex Henry at The Old Brick Workshop gallery space in Wellington Somerset. Looking around at the series of blocky concrete cast forms and inventive wall-mounted glass, metal and wooden installed photography, the un-definability and flexibility as to what are the objects, the models and potential proposals, seems in my mind at least, exactly what this exhibition is out to achieve. Hence begins an investigation into the relationships between photography and sculpture, urban forms, spaces, architecture, the model, the city and the mass produced object.

 

 Seaton’s concrete casts sit almost at home alongside the equally urban paint-weathered exposed brickwork of the Old Brick Workshop. These sculptures, with their dusky reds, yellows, greys and muted colours appear a cross between totemic-like relics, decommissioned computer servers and a 1950s Soviet government housing planning application. Emotionally they are reserved and instead draw your attention to their glorious form, their weight and shadows/space in which they inhabit (they beckon to be investigated from all angles). Cast from assorted fragments of packaging moulds and casings these ‘throw-away’ items of consumerist packaging are given a new, second-life as art objects or sculptures. The stacked floppy discs alongside some of them becoming architecturally utilitarian their original purpose now something of a retro throwback to the 80s. The resulting forms really do look utilitarian, as though their purpose has yet to be defined. It is in this element of ‘potentiality’ that Seaton seems to contextualise his work allowing the viewer to interpret and assign meaning, purpose or value to the work, “the what can be, rather than the, what is”. Sitting somewhere between sculpture, object and model it is more interesting trying to determine where these forms fit rather than be given a fixed definition.

 

The link with architecture and ‘the city’ becomes more obvious when these forms are scaled-down and placed alongside multiple others in large groups (pictured opposite).The resulting grid of forms becomes a miniature but vast citadel of skyscrapers and towers divided by rows of interlinking pathways that mimic roads.  Again, the beauty is in the possibilities of the various configurations and layouts one could create echoing some of the ‘real-life’ systems of urban development in towns and cities. This is all of course in the viewer’s imagination. We aren’t at any point told, “this is a city” or “a model” but subliminally we imprint that interpretation on it because of our brought experiences of making/understanding models and perhaps of maps and mapping. Referenced in this layout is also the circuit board repeated in the presence of floppy discs mentioned earlier. This introduction of high and low technology, man-made versus digital and the recycled and the obsolete are interesting because they make us re-evaluate the ‘purpose’ of things which have seemingly lost their usefulness i.e. the floppy discs that no longer work, become sculptural components. I speculate whether this extends to a bigger social comment on how we might take these practices one step further and reassign purpose and use of many abandoned, decaying and disused buildings and urban spaces within so many of our cities?

 

The newer work in this exhibition uses photographs of urban spaces and fragments of the city printed onto sliding glass sheets or inset into wooden/metal self-invented frames or wall-hanging installations. Like the pieces before they defy simple categorisation and become sculptural in that the viewer is encouraged to view these images from different angles or through different layers of materials resulting in a variable experience of textures, colours, shapes and layers. The contrast between the ‘fixed’ view-point of the camera in photography verses the multiple viewpoints of sculpture being an interesting juxtaposition making us rethink about the relationship between form and the space in which it inhabits; the seen and the unseen; the camera lens and lens of the glass through which the image is again viewed. This creates a sort-of duplicity that is cleverly repeated throughout the show from the collaborative relationship between Seaton and Henry to the duplicity in the layering of images; differentiation from the ‘real’, the fabricated and the imagined. Though relatively void of human presence; the viewer instead inserts themselves into these fragmented environments that are less static than the concrete ones, becoming like glimpses through a window or passing moment caught as a passenger on a train or bus journey. Small amounts of highlighted colour draw attention to architectural forms and shapes within these images which on the whole are, for me, a lot more direct at making the link between the abstract and the real city rather than the ‘imagined’ one in the concrete works.

Dotted between are sheets of urban materials, spirit levels and metals propped against walls that bring the exhibition back into the context of the Old Brick Workshop Gallery itself. Feeling somewhat uncertain whether they are intentionally or ironically out of place and at times add a bit too much clutter to the overall feel of the show in my opinion. At their best they do act as a reminder of the assembly of the exhibition and how the process of creating and installing an exhibition has parallels to the constructive potentiality of the work and ideas being exhibited within it.

 

ObjectsModelsProposals is on at The Old Brick Workshop in Wellington until February 25th. Open Thursday to Saturday from 10am until 4pm.

www.theoldbrickworkshop.com

 

 **Find out for yourself at an Artists Talk by Graham Seaton between, 10.30-12.30pm Saturday 13^th Feb -tickets available on door £5**

 

*from Italo  Calvino’s ‘Invisible Cities’