‘No Underground’ Old Seager Distillery
Deptford London (March 2005)
The room is darkened, windows have been blocked, tree-like pillars sustain
the low ceiling of this old warehouse space, art works wait like cryptic
signs, many illuminated, here a candle, there a lamp, wafting clouds
of colour towards the eye.
As if this were not inviting enough, artist Caroline Misch has opened-up the space with a wandering astro-turf path which winds into the heart of the show. There it broadens into a circle surrounded by swings, inviting play or dreamy swaying. However, the piece is not merely relaxing but also challenging, as, at regular points along the path, carefully piled outfits of clothes are topped-off with appropriate shoes suggesting that this journey requires us to leave behind everyday cares and habits.
An old-fashioned, wall-mounted dial telephone impels us -via its peculiar surface- to pick it up, only to find it surprisingly heavy. It’s cast in concrete, and as we wrestle the weighty receiver to our ear, an appropriately brutal noise greets us, making it even harder to hold in place. The artist, Francesca Ungaro, is communicating our interminable problems of communication in a way that only sculpture can achieve
One of the successes of ‘No Underground’ is that it is a celebration of sculpture as a special means of investigating and relaying idiosyncratic experience. The works speak in contemporary mode and yet are each woven from awareness of sculptural traditions discernable as aspects of Post-Minimalism, Arte Povera, Simulationism and Scatter-art.
Lucy Kippin has dipped used teabags into latex or plastic to half skin them with an incongrously beautiful French blue apparently derived from pool-cue chalk. These strange new visitors to our world are sprayed across the ground like dice as if to celebrate the unlikely chance of their coming-to-be. Multiple objects and their relation to space are also celebrated by Yuriko Usui who has cast the equally ordinary motif of jam jars in various, gentle blue tones of ephemeral latex. The heterogeneous ‘field’ of translucent, flimsy figures is seductive and beguiling, belying the project’s prosaic roots.
Nearby, Azusa Charetau, with courageous economy, has created a self-reflexive
evocation of sun and sand by lowering a lamp to almost touch a floor
stained yellow by forming a pile of builder’s sand into a circular
ridge. This contains the light as it simultaneously energises the yellowed
ground. Though shown as photographs, Emma Skeldon’s work nevertheless
strives to renew our haptic dialogue with the world. In her moody, Tarkovsky-esque
scenes, the artist sits within a misty rural location, near a blasted
tree and a circular dew pond, but her identity is obscured or extended
by a masking device of crudely formed plastic which spreads her ‘self’ out
into a simpler form, as if aspiring to de-distinguish (sic) the self
from the surrounding eerie landscape.
Red and white candles burn down in flag-like patterns onto a low
blue platform, at first mistaken for a vibrantly coloured vanity
case or briefcase. This is a work by Lara Ritosa-Roberts and, though
the simplest of 3 or 4 she shows, it is the one which sustains the gaze
and imagination, partly due to its gorgeous colours and the unpredictable
temporal process of
composition, but also because of a surprising idiosyncrasy amid these
apparently simple decisions that appears confident enough to evade
rather than invite interpretation.
Anna Chapman has tussled with the value of that most banal of domestic materials, beige-coloured carpeting, and applied it to a variety of forms which now lean and hang together in a chaotic, 21st century structure. Here and there, red wool tries in vain to weave an ordering path through the unruly tangle. In a partially opened side room, Sara Stagner’s video work loops enchanting monochromatic manipulations of her own face, always symetrically doubled but into variously grotesque, comic or erotic formations. It’s hard to tear our innner voyeur away from what might happen next in this strange procession.
Sculpture’s monumentality here passes into event. We leave the
show as a special world -lasting just ten days- that we are unlikely
to encounter again. If we look to the title -‘No Underground’-
for cohesion among the diversity, it suggests that the achievement of
these artists is to invigorate the body of sculpture as a series of surfaces
rich enough to compel our appreciation and yet elusive enough to avoid
depths imposed onto the self, the object, or its interpretation.