Balancing Bird

About

with works by Scarlett Bowman, Ed Burkes, Susan Vera Clarke, Nathan Graves Tuttle, Sogon Kim, Keith Roberts, José Guillermo Sarmiento, Benjamin Smith, Ryan Smith and contextual work by influential 20th Century British sculptor and printmaker Dame Elisabeth Frink (1930 - 1993).

Frink's anthropomorphic forms such as Small Bird 1 (1961), operate as avatars for feelings of panic, tension and aggression. Her expressionist style gives a grounded, human-like, flightless mobility to birds - often seen as a progressive symbol of freedom and flight. The accompanying sketch follows this example, the bird's hindlimbs encumbered with weight, lurching forwards at pace.

2022 ROSL RCA Ceramics and Glass Award Winner Sogon Kim's Celestial series encapsulates the reaction between metal oxides and glass. The effect is a dazzling world suspended in time at the point of interaction, presented in a circular form capable of rolling off at any moment. This surface tension is present in many of the works on display, from Keith Roberts’ suspended red kite made of plaster Duchamp’s Window (2013), to José Guillermo Sarmiento’s visceral arched back paintings Breath and Red Ear.

Forms which echo and mirror each other’s movement produce a calming zen sandbox resolution in Susan Vera Clarke’s etching Farmed and Fed (2022) whereas Pairing #2 and Pairing #3 (2022) by Benjamin Smith emphasise the narrative possibilities of imbalance. Isolated images of architecture float out of alignment within a neutral square frame and the movement present in capturing waves breaking on a shoreline or a towering shadow cast out of view hold the static atmosphere in a constant state of flux. It is a quality shared by Scarlett Bowman’s “fragments” Circus (2020) and One Way or Another (2021) whereby glimpses of material, shape and colour resurface through the plaster threshold.

Non-verbal communication across a series of visual cues are present in Ryan Smith’s Untitled photographs from his Prometheus series (2022). A butterfly, the top-down view of an eagle, a bundle of crow feathers… these manifestations retain a deeply poetic and psychological nature, as Smith writes, “just as words can be crafted into sentences, so can images”. Words have a direct compositional resonance in Ed Burkes’ paintings, often titled from within the canvas, The Dreamer (2021) we learn is perhaps “falling from a hill for a view”.

Nathan Graves Tuttle’s Synecdoche Cowboys duel across the corner of the Central Lounge, a scene described through hovering elements of a cowboy costume in the absence of a figure to wear it. The repeated grid of 16 rectangles not only place each of the two cowboys in an art historical context of figurative proportion but also adds to their animation, encircling Synecdoche Cowboy 2’s drawn weapon from its holster, ready to fire.