Visual art exhibitions and events with a platform for critical writing
The New Art Centre Sculpture Park and Gallery, Salisbury 6 July – 23 September
Reviewed by: Rosemary Shirley
In a departure from her distinctive organic forms, Daphne Wright has filled the elongated space of The New Art Centre with two giant industrial constructions – a replica of the Soviet Mir space station. Wright has used tightly folded strips of aluminium foil coated in resin: from a distance the space capsules have a steely, cool appearance, while close up they reveal their handmade origins. Her use of this domestic material and painstaking technique seems to parody the heavy metal sculptures so often made by her male counterparts.
Wright's images – four intaglio prints placed alongside the space-age forms – show dark featureless landscapes that, like her capsules, have no places for entry or exit. Their titles, Place X, Place IX, and their generic nature – revealing a glimpse of telegraph pole or farm building – locates them everywhere and nowhere. They induce the mild panic felt when waking from sleep on a train, trying to determine your whereabouts by the view from the window.
The images and sculptures are unified by the sound element, a voice speaking of a tremendous thirst and desperate search for water, "...cool, clear water". Taken originally from country and western songs, the lyrics become a diary of mirages and paranoia, "...every step we made you were there behind the talking walls".
The installation seems to speak of the universal loneliness that inspired the space-age obsession with the search for water on other planets. Wright's use of forms and images that rest in a place between representation and abstraction allows her access to the vulnerable, half-waking areas of our minds. She has caught the isolation of the vacuum, where limitless space gives no freedom, creating as much anxiety as the confining nature of the capsules.
Writer detail:
ROSEMARY SHIRLEY
is an artist based in Winchester
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