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British Art Show 7: In the Days of the Comet

I was selected for the “British Art Show 7”, a National Touring Survey Exhibition, organised by the Hayward Gallery, London, held every five years. The press release states: “The British Art Show is widely recognized as the most ambitious and influential exhibition of contemporary British art. The thirty-nine selected artists have been chosen on the grounds of their significant contribution to contemporary art in the last five years.” The exhibition toured from Nottingham Contemporary, to the Hayward Gallery, London, Glasgow Museum of Art and Royal Williams Yard, Plymouth during 2010-11.

I exhibited Relief #90, 2010, a new wall-based relief sculpture incorporating 56 parts cast from concrete, plaster, pigment, spray paint and bark. The piece is part of a series of relief sculptures I have been developing exploring aspects of form in relation to figuration, materiality and surface. Using various casting techniques developed by me, Relief # 90 is architectural in scale, emphasising a physical encounter with the work and blurring the separation between object and architectural space. My occupation with relief sculpture is grounded in my research around the architectural façade as communicative skin, and threshold between inside and outside, situated between two- and three-dimensional space.

The piece works like a tableau and has a direction and focal point like a landscape without being descriptive or pictorial of it. The mechanical attributes of its composition and layout are generated within its internal logic. Some parts are repeated, copied, mirrored and enlarged, revolving around the point at which the non-representational becomes figurative and readable.

The exhibition was widely reviewed including a review and a “Best Art of 2010” listing in the Guardian and The Observer. Relief #90 was sold to a Private Collection in London in 2012. I gave a talk featuring the work at the Arnolfini, Bristol in 2011.