Periphery - Clare Holdstock

About

Periphery brings together a new series of sculptural works and assemblages by the artist Clare Holdstock. In the show, welded geometric sculptures allude to the spindly structures of temporary signage, held down by sandbags and found on the roadsides of urban landscapes. The recent history of Modernist high design is also addressed through the appearances of the works. The forms and shapes in the exhibition mirror, for example, a transmutation of the Eames’s ‘Toy’.

Clean edged, architectural, angular cast objects, which on closer inspection are roughly hewn and contain the traces of handprints, are present around the space. These objects mirror the forms of the welded sculptures. The materials that make up the sculptural works in Periphery - plastic sheets, discarded metal, and concrete - are suggestive of objects which might be discovered in underpasses and scrubland, or in the peripheral spaces of cities. In this context, their transience and, as a result of this fragility, their unexpected beauty becomes evident. The assemblages are intersected by live plants which sit furtively among these suggestions of peripheral wasteland.