Clementine Keith-Roach. New statue

About

On first encounter, these sculptures appear as archaeological artifacts in a state of semi-ruin — fragmented limbs supporting urns suggest ancient ritual functions lost in time. Or perhaps these sculptures are not ruins, but ruins-in-reverse — statues in the process of creation, their cultural significance yet to be ascribed by a society still to emerge. Whether these are mournful objects from a lost world or propositional objects for a new world, that world appears to be one of collectivity: we see torrents of hands grasping and clutching, bodies merging, torsos sharing burdens. Resolutely acephalic (headless), these works are not representations of specific individuals but embody, in their anonymous multiplicity, bonds of love and labor.

At the center of each ‘new statue’ is a vessel. These are antique terracotta urns and bowls that the artist procures. The histories of these objects are not known but the traces of them are written into their forms and surfaces, which bear the indexical marks of the potter’s hand, the rub of countless bodies that have used them and the erosion of time. In her studio, Keith-Roach communes with each vessel in something akin to a movement practice, from which the compositions arise, before beginning the long process of sculptural intervention that is at the core of her work. She then takes plaster casts of her own body as well as the bodies of her friends and family before slowly and painstakingly merging them with the antique vessels. The final fusion is a painterly process in which the plaster casts are intricately trompe l’oeil painted to mimic all those marks of time and labor, unifying the complex assemblage into a single chimera.

Statue is a strange word, and not one that is typically applied to contemporary sculpture. Statues personify ideals and virtues or stand in for historical individuals. Triumphant and solemn, they bear down on us with their ideological weight. In personifying an ideal, statues smooth over the complexity of the particular, and in idealizing a person, they erase the difficulty of collective struggle. Keith-Roach’s new statues are not triumphant but ambiguous, not deifying but contradictory. Unlike the impossible smoothness of Justice, Prudence and indeed Liberty herself, the skin of these new statues appears cracked, porous and vulnerable. Their forms are both powerful and fragile, erotic and encumbered. The empty vessels held aloft by this multitude of limbs offer a pregnant nothingness, waiting to be filled with social meaning.

The title of the exhibition is drawn from Sylvia Plath’s 1961 poem Morning Song, which describes the ambivalence of childbirth with striking vividness. The baby is compared to a new statue, stark and gleaming in a hospital that is now a museum. The temporal and emotional ambiguity of the poem — warm, flailing newborn as cold, imposing artifact — chimes with the complexity of Keith-Roach’s works. While the poem might expose an unnerving distance between mother and child, the artist reads in it an emancipatory self-effacement, a coming to terms with the difficulty of giving birth to the new and strange. Keith-Roach’s new statues, burdened and tender, ruinous and optimistic, might stand as ambivalent monuments to a wide-open future.