Separation Anxiety

About

In Conversation: 4-6pm Monday 12 July Private View: 6-9pm Monday 12 July Show Open: Wed 14 July - Sun 18 July 2-6pm Penny Davis uses construction, painting and video to build objects that hover between sculpture and installation. They extend across the space touching walls, floors and ceilings and encroaching into the space of other works. They are built from a variety of materials and processes to create a delicately balanced web of forms and histories that teeter on the brink of collapse. Davis uses materials associated with a modern sculptural idiom such as Perspex, clay or timber with objects from a domestic or workaday context to create her structures. The objects may have been bought such as her antique drainpipes sourced from a reclamation yard or found, as with the discarded polystyrene from the street. Once selected they take their place in her carefully choreographed accretions of personal and universal narrative. The works are so dense with reference that no single narrative is able to surface and provide a resolution to the work. Instead they remain a tense constellation of ideas and forms. The title separation anxiety derives from a psychoanalytic usage, but here is suggestive of the tension between any object and its surrounding environment. Davis places a particular importance on the problematic relationship of an autonomous sculpture to installation works. At a micro level the process of removal of objects from the context that they were designed is a traumatic separation. At a macro level there are implicit fundamental questions about the future of sculpture as an autonomous object. - - - The Great Central ~ Project Space ~ gives artists the opportunity to experiment and create new work with no formal necessary outcomes other than at some point and in some way either the process or the outcomes will be publically accessible. - - - Visit www.thegreatcentral.org for more information.