Blunt Blades

About

This controversial exhibition by artist Arabel Lebrusan consists of new works made from police-confiscated knives, which have been transformed into sculptures, drawings, a social engaging publication, jewellery and other media. Friendship - Fear-  Fate, one of the central artworks, is a sound piece where three females talk about experiencing self-harm, knife attacks, and domestic abuse. Spurred when Lebrusan received three crates of knives from Bedfordshire Police in 2013, the works continue the artist’s exploration of material culture through reconfiguration, contextualisation, and collaboration. 

Arabel Lebrusan said: “Since that day eight years ago, my mind has been occupied with the idea of transforming the metal from these confiscated objects into works that could evoke different emotions. What makes a kitchen knife become a deadly weapon? What makes a deadly weapon become a healing tool? Objects and materials have the potential to hold memories. I’m fascinated by this idea that matter can vibrate, communicating with us as human beings; with the ways materials carry inherent meanings and how those meanings can be reshaped.”

Channeling the poetic charge and metaphoric resonance of the police confiscated knives and artifacts, the artist transformed the tools — commonly associated with violence — into rings, sculptures, and drawings. Foreign to the knives’ original shapes, the knives no longer cut; Lebrusan’s manipulation of materials is an extended reflection on fear and violence in British society. At a time when knife crime in the UK is the highest it has been for over a decade, Lebrusan’s alchemy is a vision of agency and compassionate humanity, the ways humans have agency to dissociate from histories and circumstances that reduce us. Provocatively, Blunt Blades reframes the dominant narrative of knives: Knives don’t kill people. People kill people.

As curator and writer Fatoş Üstek writes in the exhibition essay, ‘Blunt Blades is an exhibition that poses questions and calls for social awareness, charged with artistic inquiry. Here the method of displacement is employed at its best — objects and contexts fuse into one another while the confluence of the past and the present brings forward a cold awareness, like the surface of stainless steel.’