Exhibition: Stuart Bird

Blood Knot, 2012

Hand-carved African Mahogany

Unique

260 x 50 x 7cm

Change, 2011

Wood, coins, lightbulbs (tbd)

Unique

8 elements, 90 x 60 x 22cm each

Over the Rainbow, 2011

Supawood and broken mirrors

Edition of 3

70 x 210 x 20cm

Stuart Bird: Promise Land 

19 January - 25 February 2012

Goodman Gallery, Cape Town

Link to my review on Artthrob

Exhibition: Rachel Kneebone

Lamentations 2010: Rachel Kneebone

19 November 2010- 22 January 2011

White Cube Hoxton Square

Rachel Kneebone’s latest exhibition at the White Cube is a kind of Rococo for fans of abject erotica. The combination of complex subject matter and Kneebone’s superior grasp of the production of handmade porcelain sculpture make this a compelling show. The first part of the exhibition is located on the ground floor and is made up two sets of three sculptures dealing with loss and grief. These delicately glazed white sculptural forms offer a befitting language for dealing with this facet of a tragic human condition. Disembodied sexualised body parts in the process of becoming are mingled with more recognisable human forms that are being suffocated by a thick rope. From a distance these sculptures look like shrines to human debris, the bases of which are tellingly cracked, implying the deteriorating effects of the passing of time or perhaps the shaky foundations of historical continuity.

The second part of the exhibition, the ‘Shields’, is located on the first floor gallery. These ‘Shields’ are more like orgiastic wreaths, and within their delicate porcelain forms they show an imbrication of eroticism. Comprising of polymorphous sexual figures (made up of both phallus and orifice) the forms contort and writhe in their search for something to penetrate. Even the legs poking out from one particular ‘Shield’ are positioned amongst apparent ejaculation. Alongside this display the curator has included a series of drawings that were initial explorative studies for the ‘Shields’. The drawings lack the fluidity and unexpectedness that makes the sculptures so successful.

Lamentations has various far-reaching influences (Bellmer to Watteau) that add to the richness of its reading. However, to offer a simplified summation I would say that the exhibition offers a tantalizing insight into the dramatic chaos of the tragedy of unquenchable sexual hunger.

Exhibition: Catherine Roberts

Budgie Butlins
23 August- 25 September 2010
Belfast

Budgie Butlins tableau vivant of Fauvist flavour almost got me run over by a cab. As the colourful winsome window pulled me in, I scarcely heard the warning cries of my companion while being enchanted from across the road. Viewed only from the street through a shop window, Budgie Butlins shows a budgie-sized caravan park spanning the depth of the room. A utopian environment complete with mini-caravans on a hillside, two-dimensional mountains, trees and a few budgies, this was a fairly endearing piece of eye-candy. It offers an anthropomorphic and humoristic view on the strictly regimented Butlin’s Holiday Camps popular in the 1950s and 1960s that were later replaced by package holidays and resorts. Looking into the window one is reminded of the sometimes silliness of holidaymakers and the unattainable dream of the flawless holiday. From a more complex standpoint, Jean Baudrillard’s notions of the simulacrum are brought to mind: the budgies as a substitute for people, and the holiday camp environment for the constructed nature of experience.

Artist: Miroslaw Balka

Miroslaw Balka (b.1958) How It Is (2009)
10th Unilever Series
Tate Modern Turbine Hall

It may seem a bit old-hattish to mention this mid-way through 2010, but encountering this sculpture left me both physically goose-pimpled and mentally wobbly, and for that, it deserves a mention.

How It Is consisted of a Kraken sized black crate on stilts (13 metres high and 20 metres long) to be entered via an equally dramatic ramp. Once inside, the self-imposed challenge was to walk through a soupy- thick darkness and touch the opposite wall. There is a sense of spacial manipulation that is ideal for an investigation into the oppressive effects of certain types of architecture on the psyche. The ramp of this ‘box of darkness’ is an allusion to the ramp at the entrance of the Ghetto in Warsaw, the crate itself possibly to the railed 'cattle cars' that transported Jewish prisoners to concentration camps. I only learnt of this subtext after the fact and it certainly did supplement my post-experiential perspective, which had fastened on notions of a psychoanalytical ‘return to the womb’. Entering into such a black-hole of darkness was not only disorientating but also left one with sense of lost physical boundaries. If not for my friend clinging to me as we made our way to the other side, I would no doubt have abandoned ship almost immediately.