Something You Have to Live With
Insulation foam, pva glue, acrylic paint, aerosol paint, satin paint, wood, repair cement, steel, air-dry clay
280 x 40 x 50cm
Install view: Soho Connections, Shaftesbury Avenue, Bow Arts
A sculpture standing in the corner evokes a car-parky, hollow, broken column.
Drawing on the loose cabling at Shaftesbury Avenue, which remains after Facebook left (seemingly in a hurry), round steel bar connects two forms in a haphazard, quasi-organic way. In some places, it grows cartoonish mushrooms, suggesting a communications network. A slap-dash coat of drippy yellow paint unifies the ‘front’ and ‘inside’ planes.
Is this space, as is being suggested, in the process of being reclaimed? Or is it made more fugitive (and therefore threatening) by its apparent cheery, if formal, nothing-to-hide affectation? Its various hollownesses, damage, back to the wall, and looming scale make the second more likely.
The work is perhaps inspired by my arrival at Shaftesbury a week early, the multiple trips out the loading bay/building-site downstairs after hours, politics of the lifts, the sensation of scraping your car in an underground carpark - or the fear this yellow scrape invokes in the motorist, like a spell. At the time, I was only thinking about how I was going to get it home, so it was called Something You Have to Live With, which is fine, too; just as true of scratches when you’re skint.
It’s performative, because the ‘damage’ was all done by me.
What’s inside columns, anyway? Maybe they are all full of crap and nothing.