New Hybrids
2010
New Hybrid #1
2010
Media: wood, leather, steel and mixed media
Size: 2080 x 1600 x 1120mm
Exhibited:
2013 – Unruly Objects (one-person exhibition), Cornerstone Gallery and Arts Centre, Didcot, Oxfordshire
2010 – New Hybrids (commission) part of Oxford Brookes Cultural Olympiad, Richard Hamilton Building, Oxford.
About this work:
In 2009, twelve years after completing Hybrid (1997) I was commissioned to revisit and develop the project as part of the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad. Three works came out of this process, two sculptural pieces and a set of fourteen drawings. Collectively known as New Hybrids (2010) these works were first exhibited alongside Hybrid in the Brookes Cultural Olympiad exhibition, which took place in the Richard Hamilton Building, Oxford Brookes University in 2010. Once again, I used creative strategies of juxtaposing highly particularised materials, objects and points of reference to create works that were unsettling in their simultaneous familiarity and strangeness. This time, however, because of a specific commissioning context, more overt and wide-ranging links were made to sport—specifically gymnastics, show jumping, sailing and climbing. Research for this project was prompted by re-considering the multi-faceted readings originally generated by Hybrid. Careful sourcing of readymade components alongside bespoke crafting of other materials enabled me to design and construct New Hybrid #1, a large free-standing sculpture, which appears to read equally convincingly as either a gymnastic vaulting box or an equestrian show jump. Part-leather clad wooden rails rest precariously on welded steel jump-cups, making up the familiar trapezoidal form of the vaulting box. The signifying instability of this work is expressed through uncertainty—not knowing who will ‘jump’ a human or a horse and rider. One scenario requires utter stability for a gymnast’s safety and demonstration of breathtaking skills. The other requires precarious elements easily toppled in a thrilling measure of unpredictable perfection or error. The scale of the work not only suggests either possibility, but also proposes the presence of another beast, especially in close proximity to Hybrid. Curious twin red and bulbous rubber forms hang within knotted elasticated compression stockings from one end of the sculpture between two of its legs. These suggest genital possibilities, signifying not only that the sculpture has a ‘head’ and a ‘rump’, but also a particular gender and animalistic virility.
New Hybrid #2
2010
Media: chalk on black paper (x14)
Size: various dimensions
Exhibited:
2013 – Unruly Objects (one-person exhibition), Cornerstone Gallery and Arts Centre, Didcot, Oxfordshire
2010 – New Hybrids (commission) part of Oxford Brookes Cultural Olympiad, Richard Hamilton Building, Oxford.
About this work:
Playful suggestiveness is in evidence, in New Hybrid #2, a work comprising 14 drawings of epoxy resin climbing holds made in chalk on black paper in beech wood frames. The concept of absurd logic, found in many of my works, is again played out in these hand-drawn images—akin to surreal bio-morphic shapes—which, when hung collectively, appear to ‘climb’ the gallery wall in sympathy with their sporting subject matter. When conducting research for New Hybrids, I became intrigued by the sensual, organic and ergonomic shapes of these individual objects taken out of their wall-mounted context and observed in isolation, especially as their names alluded to body parts and were suggestive of sensual or erotic acts—‘jugs’, ‘cracks’, ‘pinches’ and ‘screw-ons’. Each drawing in New Hybrid #2 is of a single climbing hold, an object that, on its own, without being anchored to a wall surface, has no use value, a point extended by my rendering of potentially useful three-dimensional objects into two-dimensional ‘useless’ ones. Like mini blackboards the framed drawings in chalk have a possible instructional quality, though as amorphic images they represent the impotence and futility of non-experiential learning. The images do, however, possess a materially redeeming feature. Whilst the drawings would be obviously destroyed by any climbing attempt to physically grapple with them through tactile means, the chalk sticks they are drawn with are used in powder form by climbers to help them grip precarious holds. This ‘material as object’ (chalk used by climbers and by artists) when making illusory images—is what I refer to as the ‘stuff’ of the world, sharing the same space in
New Hybrid #3
2010
Media: wood, leather, steel, rope, snowshoes, mixed media
Size: dimensions variable
Exhibited:
2013 – Unruly Objects (one-person exhibition), Cornerstone Gallery and Arts Centre, Didcot, Oxfordshire
2010 – New Hybrids (commission) part of Oxford Brookes Cultural Olympiad, Richard Hamilton Building, Oxford.
About this work:
New Hybrid #3 has points of reference that hover between—or hybridise—the gymnasium and the dinghy. Further, it utilises specialist architectural timbers and ironmongery. This large, multi-part floor and wall-based sculpture rises some 3.5m from the floor. Two long wooden poles are suspended on pivoting fixtures—boom-like—from the wall, by means of a rope pulley system afforded by a variety of chandlery fittings. Beneath the poles, two leather rings hang, too high to reach and grasp without assistance. Beneath the rings, another part of the sculpture seemingly offers a solution. This part-object masquerades as a springboard used for gymnastic vaulting, yet two further problems are posed. The springboard appears ‘frozen’ in mid-flex (by means of its curved surface): its potential spring is simultaneously rigid, unable to offer the bounce needed to put the ‘spring’ into the ‘board’. Another obstacle is posed by a pair of snowshoes placed directly beneath the hanging rings above. This alien object seems out of place—part of winter survival gear—except for the fact that the fluorescent orange rope making up the enlarged foot-bed of the snowshoes is echoed by the bright orange reinforced webbing attaching the gymnastic like leather rings to the rest of the work. This poses another conundrum, a sense of disorientation, proposing to the audience an imagined leap into the air via differing water-based states resulting in an uncertainty as to where the solid ground may be.
