Brood

This group of sculptures continues with themes established in my previous body of work titled Limbo. I obviously hadn’t finished yet. I suppose you never do...

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During hard lock-down and at the onset of the pandemic I set up a studio at home.

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I wrote about the Limbo work:

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“I have been researching the small Japanese Netsuke kimono fasteners for a while. Deliciously refined and paired down decorative mini sculptures carved in stone, wood or ivory. Sometimes cast into metals  and mostly of animals. In my enquiries I came across the Japanese tradition of placing a to- scale wooden  sculpture of a rabbit looking heavenwards outside houses and businesses as charms that might bring prosperity, good luck, and fertility.

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This seemed like a good place to kick off my lock-down therapy, so I started by making small symbolic portraits of the four of us at home as animals. My partner, our two young boys and myself. We have an odd collection of small animal sculptures and toys around the house. These inspired. As do the Ghanaian Ashanti king’s linguist’s staffs: exquisitely carved wooden figurative finials, finished in gold leaf, that describe through visual proverbs each king’s strengths and visions.

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Sanell loves rabbits and we certainly needed the good fortune, so she was portrayed as a rabbit. Lo is wise beyond his years and was represented as an owl. Kai as a mischievous monkey. All three are looking to the heavens for guidance or as witnesses to an impending calamity. I hold my hands looking down anxiously as a monkey and father. In hope and in fear.

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These first four seemed to resonate effectively ...so I extended the series, describing the intimacy and anxiety of isolation and of social separation that has been a universally shared experience and somehow paradoxically binds humanity together. Hopefully.“

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What I thought I had produced was a single- issue body of work. A response to the pandemic reflecting our mutual fears. A fragile tenderness. Our collective breath had been held for a few years. The state of us then.

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However, on seeing the works installed a few years post-covid it seemed a broader reading was possible. Implicit rather than explicit. We are currently gripped by uncertainties; global warming, nationalism, xenophobia, failed states, the refugee crisis, the rise of populist right-wing agendas, wars, genocide...and more. These  weigh heavily on our ‘families’. The new works collectively titled BROOD extend the themes of familial  intimacies in times of tragedy and fear. They describe a world of trepidation and vulnerability. Violence and uncertainty.

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Melancholic by default.