ARTISTS TALKING

There’s a whiff of construction, building sites and messing about with tools in ‘Hard Labour’. The commonality of works and practices on show is the use of materials and skills evocative of industrious toil. And, whilst there are also other common concerns or preoccupations, Richard Priestley’s curation constructs a dialogue between some very different works within the space.

The moods and tone of the works vary. Some feel like tentative exploration and others command attention with a confident presence and mass. Stewart Gough’s untitled piece is a fantastic and lovingly created hybrid in plastic tubing, perforated metal and thousands of tiny industrial nuts and bolts. If there were such a thing as a Master of Electrical Tape, Gough’s age cannot deny him the title. The precise wrapping with which the red tape literally binds his construction atop tank treads, is not only an act of consummate craft, but is also the kind of work that elicits internal gasps of childish jealously at another’s obvious virtuosity.

For all its exuberant sense of gluttony at Hamley’s Meccano counter, this work demonstrates a thoughtfulness and clarity of construction. The lineage – in line, colour and materials – shows as much of an understanding of Russian Constructivism and British 60s utopian architectural movements as it does of a boyhood ecstasy at a box of miniaturised mechanical hardware. Perhaps, most of all, the work elicits a gut response because it speaks of an unfashionable pride in achievement, of a painstaking job well done. This earnest sense of accomplishment is something it shares with a number of the other works.

Sophie Newell’s Celcon is, in part, interesting because of its lack of other elements, such as neon lights that feature in other recent work. It hardly suffers from being pared down to the barest materials, constructed entirely of the breezeblock material from which it takes its name. Newell has cut into the industrial material, creating facets and stark surfaces that work together once they are rearranged as the floor-standing structure. Alluding at once to a classical language and a kind of deconstructed modernism, this piece walks a clever and dangerous line. If it had veered too far one way it could have been mistaken for the worst excesses of a trite post-modern pastiche. But, in these capable hands, the counterbalance of other elements pulls it firmly into a context in which these apparently unusual juxtapositions bring a fresh view and cohesion. Weighty and initially quiet, there is a tension and energy in this work that is hard to define. The allusion to spiritual spaces (the temple) is undeniable. It is complex. A form of Cassandra Complex, the work seems to tell us of a truth that we try not to hear, a monument foretelling its own collapse in its very construction.

Shahin Afrassiabi’s work The Lighting Concept is something of a sculpture in non-materials; or, the materials of light for the scientifically pedantic. Despite the emotionless corporate spaces to which the piece seems to refer, it remains a beautiful thing, a clever object that is conceptually watertight. It does exactly what it says on the box.

If ‘Hard Labour’ is about materials, then perhaps it is also an unintended metaphor for the place of Cell itself. At a time in which commercial spaces retain a ball-breaking vice on showing the new arrivals alongside the established, as smaller public galleries all but fall away in London, then the act of formulating strong shows like this one cannot be light work for artist-led emerging spaces.

If you are going to do ‘Hard Labour’, then get sent down to Cell.