Sculpture Shock is a new award for artists working in three dimensions. Three winners each received £3,000 and undertake a three month residency in a studio in Chelsea culminating in a surprising spatial intervention in one of three non-traditional spaces.
The winners worked from the sculpture studio used by the late Dame Elisabeth Frink and, latterly, by emerging artist Julian Wild. Each artist was invited to ambush us with work which breaks free from the clinical white cage of the gallery space and responds to a non-traditional environment.
These environments are subterranean (the unseen world underneath our city), ambulatory (in movement through space and time) or historic (in an historic and illustrious building in our Royal Borough). Each work was shown in its location for a minimum 4-day pop-up exhibition.
Subterranean
Winner: David Ogle
David Ogle's light installations in the SUBTERRANEAN world challenge our perceptions of light and form through intricate ‘drawings’ through the darkness of these cavernous spaces underneath Waterloo Station. An unexpected fusion of the manual and the technological, Ogle uses light as a sculptural medium to create captivating and enigmatic interventions. They are compelling in their fragility, their transience. They tread the compelling line between form and ambient effect.
Ogle’s work focuses on the perception of objects in space. It begins as a set of strict mathematical procedures that are played out within an environment. The space simultaneously shapes the work and becomes manipulated by it. Through negating material properties, his practice attains a compelling fragility. It exists between sculptural form and an environmental effect (that of light) within a space. The work is inseparable from its context. He utilises both ambient and artificial light, channelling it and moulding it into sculptural works that divorce themselves from static material to create sculptures without mass and forms without structures.
Using light as a sculptural medium, Ogle’s work is temporary and ephemeral. He regards them more as events or interventions than objects. A set of procedures are executed within the space, the results exist in concrete form for a while and then it is destroyed. Then, in another place, at another the time, those same operations can be ‘reactivated’, with the work coming into being again. Each time the work is made anew, its form is dictated by the surroundings in which it appears; the system, the blueprint or its making surviving after each of the works are demolished. Giving the works numerical titles makes them part of an infinite ongoing system which the artist uses as a way of cataloguing work that no longer exists. It also allows Ogle to remain dispassionate about the inevitably short life-span of the work. As his second solo exhibition, the installation is titled 00002.
Ambulatory
Winner: Amy Sharrocks
Amy Sharrocks was asked to create a series of live art events without physical confines and in movement through space and time in the Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea.
For the duration of her 3-month residency, Sharrocks has been falling. Sometimes using her own body and often inviting groups to join her in acts of vulnerability, attempting to understand falling as the natural way of things. She is exploring the meaning and experience of both physical and conceptual falling. She questions the feelings of exposure and shame of being un-surefooted, the difficulties of being out of control and the liberation of inelegance.
Season for Falling
Sharrocks’ work exists in the ‘architecture of the moment that is made between people’ and is born from the bravery and inventiveness of people’s responses to the situations she creates. She invites participants in her live artworks to walk, swim or stumble with her on a journey with a sense of humour, joy and risk. She gathers communities of people and through workshops, talking, sharing and taking part in some physical act, she ‘ties them together’, binding them through the richness of their shared experience.
Her practice is socially engaged and encourages the public to analyse their strengths, their surroundings and the possibilities within them both.
Season for Falling is a live artwork comprising an open invitation for people to fall in view of others, attempting to un-shame falling and to open up a potential for flying in safe and controlled environs.
Historic
Winner: Nika Neelova
Nika Neelova’s work challenges both our perceptions of the historic context and the resonance of form and architectural unity. Horizon Fold literally folds nature onto the direct uncoloured incontestable mathematical interpretation of the world and of nature. Neelova refers to the words of philosopher Gilles Deleuze in Le pli - Leibniz et le baroque (1988) “Folds of winds, of waters, of fire and earth, and subterranean fold of veins of ore in a mine. In a system of complex interactions, the solid pleats of ‘natural geography’ refer to the effect first of fire, and then of waters, and winds on the earth; and the veins of metal in mines resemble the curves of conical forms, sometimes ending in a circle or an ellipse…”
Spatial and temporal limitations define humanity. For centuries, Art, Science and Religion have grappled with this existential dilemma. Trying to break free from these boundaries has been the impetus behind much of the creative processes that inhabit our societies.
Science seeks logic through geometrising the world. From Platonic sacred geometry to the tessellation of space with polyhedra of specific forms, Science endeavours to explain Space by revealing its underlying geometric nature. Therein lies a hope of reducing its immensity to a human scale.
Sculpture explores the act of creating new spaces from nothingness; by defining its own space where none existed before, this art of self-appropriation subordinates space to man.
Through her polyhedral creations, Nika Neelova is offering a certain alternative that lies at the confluence of both Art and Science. In Neelova’s work, Science and Art combine in a dialogue that draws upon the strength of the other, further questioning our understanding of space.
Holy Trinity Sloane Square, by the vastness of its architecture but also the silence that inhabits it, epitomizes the spatial trauma of humanity and re-enforces the urge to find an answer. At the same time, in this very particular space, the act of questioning finds a different harmony and the struggle becomes contemplation.
Sculpture Shock: Site Specific Interventions in Subterranean, Ambulatory and Historic Contexts
Copies of Sculpture Shock: Site Specific Interventions in Subterranean, Ambulatory and Historic Contexts can be purchased on Amazon, Blackwells or Waterstones. Copies are also available to collect at Dora House.