Odd on a Grecian Urn
David Ray's New Work features ten pieces. The majority are earthenware. Beyond that, it is hard to find words adequate to the collision of sculptural and ceramic forms which they present. It is as if the images traditionally adorning vases and urns have been extruded into the three-dimensional texture of these works. Can Do, for instance, is a conventional vase form, only it has a three-dimensional horse bucking at its base, and a thrown rider coming out of the upper half of the vessel and into the bare white space of the gallery. The effect is brain-bending. As if we were looking through eyes we didn’t know we possessed. The trick is to maintain focus.
White Man Dreaming 2002 photo: Shannon McGrath
White Man Dreaming begins as a little man, who could be a garden gnome, only his face is pallid, or rather white, deathly white, his lips red, as if lipsticked on, and his eyes far too wide. He has a yellow scarf. And there is a sort of vase, a monstrous profusion, an accretion of turrets, red square towers and decaled 18th century balloons, growing out of his back and into the space behind him. Again, it’s hard to know whether to call the work a vase, or a sculpture, or what… But what disturbs me about White Man Dreaming is that the lid of the vase, if vase it is, is located not on the man’s head, but rather on the dream behind him. How can a dream have it’s own lid? And why am I reminded of a funerary urn? For all the white men that have ever been before
thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st
These are not self-contained works. It is not merely that they produce associations. The explosion of form radiates outward to effect the immediate surrounds as well. For there is something so collided and warped about these admixtures of myth, fairytale, vase and figure, that you half-expect the gallery to burst open too. Along with all the rest of the culture, stories and what leaf-fringed legend haunts about thy shape interiors in the world. Into ceramics and sculptures.
beauty is truth, truth beauty, – that is all
I'm quoting some lines of Keats (his Ode on a Grecian Urn) to try and recreate the effect of quotation in East/West, one of the best pieces in New Work. And also to suggest a criterion by which these forms might be judged. East/West is an upright, transparent, white porcelain vase that has been warped almost to the shape of a kneepad. It’s slightly cracked.
ye know on earth, and all ye need to know
Moulded into this surface are a series of gold-brushed picture frames, some with traces of old-masters, others missing sides of the frame, curved and warped. A curved eyelid effect. An open lid. Searching for its own image. Or body.
East/West could be a comment upon the story-finding urge driving all these works. In Gabriel, for instance, a cartoonish Rapunzel sculpture is visited by the archangel, here decaled onto a vase that rise to assume Oh Attic shape a fish-form lid. When with brede / Of marble men and maidens overwrought it works, this fragmentation - for what is the actual story? – serves to remind you of the way all objects contain stories. That is to say, the attempt to find one’s way through the various webs of association, quotation and confusion presented in New Workcould well open your eyes to that strange, and half-terrifying, process by which the objects surrounding us serve to symbolise not just what we know about ourselves and our everyday lives, but also what we don’t know. There, in that vase. There are stories in the things all around us, a fact nowhere more apparent than when you break one of them. Though then again, and this is the unsatisfying side of this exhibit, there is always the possibility that collisions like Garbiel are really just an accident.
The overall effect is still powerful. You have the feeling that these works – and maybe the gallery too - are all on the verge of metamorphosing into something. They evoke the possibility of some post-apocalyptic world in which everything, all our everyday lives, will just burst into mythic presence. Which could be art. Osama bin Laden did this to us, you know. And that’s perhaps the problem. It’s almost impossible for an artist working at the moment not to evoke debris, mangling, excesses of meaning, aquariums, waste-land. Politics has finally got modernist, and we are of course it’s container. A Grecian urn. But such landscapes can easily overwhelm, in the sense that they fail to speak. Some of the pieces (I would put Can Do in this category)are just too imaginative. This is not usually regarded as a criticism, but I mean by it that the images are in excess, and the possible effect of the work diminished. They don’t speak to you days, or even lifetimes later. They’re too imaginative.
Vision Collision 2002 photo: Shannon McGrath
Whereas Vision Collision, which is one of the quieter of these works, has made a hole in my week, and is still opening out.
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
as doth eternityLiterally formed from the collision of two vase forms, the work has been sculpted into a see-through picture frame, at one end, and staring right back through it, a conch-like orifice at the other. The frame bears all the ornateness of a European Master, though the absence of the picture, and then the wall behind it, is disconcerting. For what you see, through this aperture, is, in part, the interior of the piece (an architecture of colonnades, and chess-tiled floors) and, in part, the external space of the gallery, including the other people staring through Vision Collision at you. It gives you a new perspective (on painting, galleries, architecture) and frames you to see through it, or even exist within it. I’ve no idea what it means. But surely that is the point of any creative container: to give us a lid we didn’t even know we had, and invite us to open it. Out beyond thought.
An eyelid.
