Terry Adkins. Disclosure

About

After taking up printmaking as his initial foray into the visual arts, in the 1980s Adkins turned his focus to sculpture. He developed a sculptural language characterised by substantial, abstract forms using primarily found metal and wood, including varieties collected during travels to the Caribbean. In the organic, geometrically elegant early works like Elixir (1986) and Passenger (1988) presented in this exhibition, the lexicon of his early influences is clearly evident, and the distinctive kernels of Adkins’s later practice already present: found materials, improvisatory combinations, handmade construction, haptic surfaces, symbolism and post-minimalist considerations. Emblematic of this period is Word (1986), a concise, enigmatic piece realised through the integration of found metals and wood with plaster. Lying horizontally on the gallery floor, the work recalls Minimalist aesthetics while subverting the genre’s fetishism for slickness in the use of naturally patinated iron and brass, baring their weathered quality to reveal what Adkins referred to as ‘the potential expression’ embedded in found objects. He favoured used and utilitarian materials – ‘things made by other hands for other purposes’, as he put it – for the immaterial qualities accrued in the object through human use or labour.