Output details

Hazardous Materials

Solo Exhibition

Curated by Bridget Cusack with support from Art Council England, Hazardous Materials instigated a new body of work examining the key concerns of Fisher's artistic research (ppt: 2-11). This questions cultural representations of violence, disaster and masculine stereotypes both ‘in and through’ art practice. At the same time, it investigates established boundaries and definitions of art production and traditions of sculptural form; it’s materiality, gendered modes of fabrication and contexts of display.

The pictorial experience of sculpture is particularly important to this current inquiry and to the ways the work disrupts conventions (ppt:6 - 8). The ‘back’ of the sculpture is emphasized, to draw attention to the pictorial quality of the object. This sculptural device undermines the heroic tradition of sculpture as an ‘object that stands in the round’, exemplified by Fisher’s direct reference to artists such as Richard Artschwager and Claes Oldenburg (ppt:2-9).

The exhibition was accompanied by a catalogue (ppt:14-15), published by Plymouth College of Art with a Preface by the curators of Viewpoint Gallery, Hannah Jones and Rachel Dobbs, and a critical text by Lee Triming an artist/ writer published in Art in America, a-n and Flash Art.

The work produced for ‘Hazardous Materials’ has been shown subsequently in the following exhibitions; ‘Foolish Act’ (solo) Viewpoint Gallery, Plymouth College of Art, Plymouth, 2009 (ppt:19-20), ‘CAT-AS-TROPHE!’ (solo) Bonington Gallery, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, 2009 (ppt:21), ‘Reckless Behaviour’, (solo) CoExist Gallery, TAP, Southend-on-Sea, 2011 (ppt:24) and ‘Necrospective’, (2012) a touring group exhibition curated by the artist Thomas Johnson (ppt:25). Work from ‘Hazardous Materials’ appears in Nadine Monem (ed.) (2008) Contemporary Textiles: The Fabric of Fine Art, London: Black Dog Publishing ISBN 978-1-906155-29 which is a substantial review of contemporary textiles (ppt:18).