Group Show at GAO Gallery, London

Ranging from the austere to the expansive, the works demonstrate a variety of approaches towards making. Some are preordained by sketches or created to fulfil a narrative contract, while others discover possibility only through their craft-based processes, in a continuously shifting act of contingency that depends on the maker’s response to the material in order for the work to emerge. There is an association of violence throughout much of the show. Not necessarily as concept or preoccupation, but rather something that binds them all together, pinioned within the works’ design. The violence of colour snaking through the sheer refinement of a governing composition; slapstick, cartoon violence; the violence of bodies and digestion, of language pushed to the point of rupture, transformation. Materials are harmed, sculpture is forced to colonise other media. Elsewhere the violence is elliptical, linked to a succession of images whose meanings are themselves made from a scintillation of possible meanings, endlessly torn down and recombined, a movement of eddies and whirls, empty turns and abrupt sensations. The effect is cumulative. Taken as one, the works offer a dynamic contemplation of the contemporary moment, where the substance of experience is forever changing.