Alison Wilding is a sculptor of primal abstraction. She curls metal plates around pillars of stone, slots wedges into hollows, creates pools of colour your eyes can dive into. Impenetrable steel opens to reveal organic depths. If her works tell a story, it is the story of their own making. They are constructions that have found their true form through a painstaking orchestration of the innate qualities of the rawest of raw materials. Her sculptures are never representations of things; they are things in themselves.
They are self-referential, self-sufficient: so what is the artist doing accepting a commission to produce 12 sculptures based on The Passion? And why show the half-completed project within the imposing post-industrial grandeur of the Henry Moore Foundation Studio?
The Dean Clough Studio is haunted by its industrial history as a monolithic carpet factory. It is also haunted by a history, established by its recently deceased director, Robert Hopper, as one of the most prestigious warehouse venues for international installation art. Yet this is really an exhibition, not an installation. Wilding's works are scattered around the dusty slab-stone floors as if they have arrived from another, more appropriate, place, perhaps a white-cube gallery or a modernist church.
She has titled the exhibition Contract and based individual pieces loosely on the themes of Christ's entry into Jerusalem, the betrayal and the entombment. She masks such references with titles like Deep Water, Inversion and Harbour and she does right. In fact, I can't help but think she might have been better keeping quiet about the whole business of the contractual theme. As it is, an upended circular slab of concrete set against a latex carpet of hairy spikes automatically brings to mind haloes and crowns of thorns. A slit carved into a block of alabaster and filled with a black tarry spillage is reminiscent of a wound.
Worse, the red of a roll of translucent plastic is blood red. This surely goes against the Wilding grain, according to her past achievements. A good piece by this artist can be a profound sensuous presence. She is one of those rare artists capable of momentarily freeing the viewer from the clumsiness and complication of wordy thought.
Here the words, and they are pretty serious words, just get in the way.
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