Lucy May - new sculpture 

Opening at the Gone Tomorrow Gallery on Saturday 6 September is new work from Lucy May. Her latest and largest to date is a new work from the series Conglomerates, which Lucy May has been working on since 2005. The culmination of this impressive series of work, the sculptures consists of semi-figurative forms emerging from a molten mass of plastic flowers. They are finished by a combination of flocking and spray painting and are always entirely and uncompromisingly black.

May's subject matter (and in a sense her chosen medium) is memory. This is memory in its Proustian sense, as something fluid and unwieldy in which the remains of past experiences flow, semi-distinguishable and attached by imperceptible and arbitrary connections. The sculptures literally ooze out from the walls, floors and corners of the gallery. May's work is the antithesis to the white cube space – it is complicated, chaotic and dark.

Conglomerates embraces a wide range of influences ranging from the etchings of Goya to early 20th century illustrators such Aubrey Beardsley and Sidney Sime via a myriad of sources, including 19th century dolls and art-deco advertising.
May's style is often described as gothic – particularly in the context of John Ruskin's definition of the gothic as the ultimate expression of beauty, painstaking craftsmanship and the 'grotesquesness' of individual imagination. Her style should also be considered, however, as paying tribute to the organic feminine outpourings of the baroque or the elegant effluvia of art-nouveau.

This is not, therefore, art which seeks to make statements or wrestle with semantics, but rather allies itself to periods in which the decorative and beautiful have been used to express the mysterious and the unarticulated.
The pieces in Conglomorates are not intended to challenge or provoke, but rather to lurk in the recesses of the imagination and, only when the light of our attention is diverted elsewhere, to flourish and take on a life of their own.
http://www.gonetomorrowgallery.co.uk/showing.html