skullpture

I had a stimulating discussion with a friend the other day who’s an artist. She’s trying to decide what direction to take her work, and is torn between stylised representational work and work that has an intellectual depth. The two aren’t mutually exclusive, of course, but she’s recently been forced to move away from the purely representational, and while that used to satisfy her, she seems reluctant to return completely.

As an interested observer, I find it a fascinating dilemma. She’s a talented sculptor in clay, metal and paper, and is keen to resume painting, so she has all sorts of options, perhaps too many to make it an easy decision. It’s made more difficult still by the Fine Art course she’s currently on compared to the one she’d like to transfer to.

Some of her recent sculpture includes small human torsos in clay, with rectilinear pieces either moved slightly or removed altogether. The surfaces are marked with abstract patterns reminiscent of a time-worn patina or perhaps underlying muscles, so that the pieces are reminiscent of all sorts of ideas – ancient Greek sculpture, models for medical students, Leonardo da Vinci’s anatomical drawings, dolls, Eduardo Paolozzi’s sectioned heads or one of the traps in The Cube. Perhaps the slicings are a physical manifestation of inner turmoil, as though a reflexology chart or a phrenologist’s glazed head has been given a gruesome twist. She experimented with different forms of presentation – pieces in a sectioned box as though they comprise a self-assembly kit gathered by an obsessive collector, and held onto mounting sheets by plastic ties with bondage overtones.

She has sculpted many horses over the years, but her latest are either cast in bronze resin or made from twisted and torn copper sheets, the latter looking like a nightmare – a hollow re-animated corpse, driven by a force so strong that the lack of bone and muscle somehow isn’t an impediment.

I’ve made her work sound unpleasant, but it really isn’t. Some of it is full of energy, while other pieces are calm and steady. She’s going to redevelop her website to show her new work, and when she does, I’ll link to it, since my words can’t possibly describe it adequately.