February 16th - March 9th 2008
Crimes Town is pleased to present the series of sculptures “Conglomerates”, by the artist Lucy May.
The title of the show not only refers to the technique and the physical object themselves but also invites the overlooked and discarded, in her multiple reference and utilisation of imagery from mediaeval marginalia to children’s imagination and their educational universe.
The organic shapes that the artist produces depict an explosive growth within a restrained cast. The constrained bursts are tokens of a short-lived complete freedom. Turning the sculpture into funeral commemoration of a lost autonomy, the frozen attitude of the work opens a new level of contrasting meanings. The black plastic flowers offer a muted comment on the brevity of life. The fatal temptation for an eternal and artificial youth is typified in the body parts; limbs swallowed in during the metamorphosis of the work.
The heterogeneous amalgams offer modern response to the grotesque gargoyles and hidden figures in the mediaeval architecture and manuscript margins, referred to as ‘controlled mayhem’ and ‘class antagonism’ (Michael Camille). A distinct aura of Gothic arises from the following common characteristics of the pieces: Savageness, Changefulness, Naturalism, Grotesqueness, Rigidity and Redundance constituting Ruskin’s exact definition of the term.