Photo Credit: Steve Tanner
Second Nature at Tremenheere Sculpture Gardens 2024
A Changeable Beast Exhibition
Curated by Tessa Garland
Catalogue Introduction
Involving thirty artists, the exhibition Second Nature is an ambitious, bold, and notable undertaking. It spans several years of conversations and planning by the group Changeable Beast. This collective of sculptors is connected by a shared concern for the process of making and its social relevance.
The exhibition delves into the intricate processes employed to craft something at the turn of the second quarter of the millennium, posing questions that must be grappled with. On one hand, there is a tradition to be shared, taking a passage from a 1959 conversation with Barbara Hepworth as a cue:
"Art at the moment is thrilling. The work of the artist today springs from innate impulses towards life, towards growth—impulses whose rhythms and structures have to do with the power and insistence of life. [...] In the past, when sculpture was based on the human figure, we knew this structure well. But today we are concerned with structures in an infinitely wider sense, in a universal sense. Our thoughts can either lead us to life and continuity or [...] the way to annihilation. That is why it is so important that we find our complete sense of continuity backwards and forwards in this new world of forms and values. I see the present development in art as something opposed to any materialistic, anti-human, or mechanistic direction of mind."
The landscape today continues to change as our collective memories are stored not on headstones but hard drives and the clouds that exist in our lexicon now process planetary-scale computation. However, Hepworth’s observation of an artistic pursuit that supports intuitive responses is one that the members of Changeable Beast recognize. How does one make effective decisions today when we are able to visualize damage on a global scale? Making art is all about decision-making: when to say yes or no, when to resist or go with the flow, when to make or unmake. It is only through practice that one can feel which decision is the right one to make and when. Is this the second nature that the show is themed around? The altera natura of habits ingrained through consistent practice produces a state where the act of doing has a clarity that cannot be gained in any other way. A second nature that becomes an intrinsic part of one’s character or behavior through repetition and practice is an interesting lens to consider the work of Changeable Beast, a collective that shares its knowledge and skills as a method of discourse.
The show was also conceived by the artists in response to the environment of Tremenhere and is a dialogue between the built and constructed and the natural landscape of Cornwall. Tremenhere Sculpture Gardens, located on the southern tip of the Cornish peninsula overlooking Mount’s Bay and the tidal island of St. Michael’s Mount, features an 8th-century monastery and fortified construction that sits upon a granite outcrop on the horizon line, communing with the changing environment. In a way, the view of the Mount from Tremenhere is metonymic of the artworks presented in Second Nature. When looking at St. Michael’s Mount, the viewer can contemplate the human endeavor of the object perched on the craggy outcrop and consider the combination of material processes utilized in its realization. The viewer is also thrust into imagining the deep time of the geological formations that provided the conditions for the outcrop to come into being in the first place, leading one to contemplate that the object and the environment cannot be disjoined from each other. But what of the sensation of viewing the Mount from afar during the changing light conditions of a day and through the landscape of Tremenhere? The onlooker comes to acknowledge the interplay of a whole constellation of elements, conditions, and things whereby the nature of one thing can only be thought of through its relation to an expanded universe of other things.
One such piece might be Alice Wilson’s Supra. As we peer through her framework, we imagine an external world while conceding that the imposition of the artwork has a demonstrable effect on the very environment it seeks to describe.
Living Surfaces
The work in Second Nature offers a unique dialogue with the material world. From one of the many vistas at Tremenhere, we look out toward Mount’s Bay and the expanse of water, which acts as a liquid medium that allows the island to glide and float, surrounding and framing it to create an image of sorts. From the vantage point of Tremenhere, this exemplifies how the surface of the earth might be thought of as an environment of images, where the world is made of material surfaces that produce and can be read as images. Life on earth occurs on these surfaces, on the thin upper layer like a piece of photosensitive film that reacts to the sun's energy.
The photographic work of Belinda Worsley makes the connection between the photographic formation of an image and the forms that plants take under lighting conditions, a parallel observed by Darwin. Meanwhile, the synthetic plants of Alex Hegazy evoke a vegetal surface that has already been recoated by the chemical industry. The surface carpet of lichen is another form of photosynthetic matter that Rachel Causer mimics in her biomorphic tiles. Causer creates these through a complex casting process, imprinting the surface with a furry texture reminiscent of mold. Causer’s panels merge the inscription on the surface with the tactility of the object, while Chuting Lee’s painted tree makes visible the bifurcation of branches on Norway Spruce cultivated and harvested on a Christmas tree farm.
In Tina Culverhouse’s Peaked to White, Three Flags, we might think of these as more than flags, but as living maps, diagrams, screens, and visualizations of living surfaces with Rorschach-style printed ink stains on their surface. Like Causer, the veneer is not flat but ‘shapeshifting’ as they undulate across the ground and interact with the shadows of trees like a photogram.
In Ellie Reid’s A Moment of Being, a glittering facade presents another aspect of the idea of sculpture as a living surface. Here, a sequined panel of reflective plastic discs shimmers in the breeze. Reid has embedded patterns into these surfaces that she has extracted from the Tremenhere landscape. Encoding them into a billboard, the panels are reminiscent of shop signs and, like Hegazy, challenge the idea of synthetic nature. The piece is situated at the intersection of the Pilgrim's walk, and Reid’s sculptures, like the others, are elastic enough to both merge with and stand apart from the terrain as they signpost and converse with old and new pathways across the landscape.
By exploring the notion of living surfaces, these sculptures challenge the difficult assumptions between the world we exist in and the world we write into—a knotty issue that Susan Young explores in her braided sculptures, which combine everything from thirty-year-old bank statements to ballet tights, banana skins, and dandelion seeds into knitted sinews that are woven together and cascade downwards, asking us to think about an entangled metabolic process.
Human Nature
It is perhaps a presumption of the Western canon that, for most of its history, sculpture has devoted itself to depictions of the body. We might come to doubt the veracity of such assertions, but the built environment is nevertheless populated by statues of some sort. Indeed, a century ago, sculptors routinely made a living from memorials and monuments. In Second Nature, we are confronted with several works that ask us to consider the fragility of human memory, what we might forget and recall, and how we might go about re-membering.
One such object is Carolyn Whittaker’s Regroup II, a stack of wrung-out matter, brutishly and unapologetically located on the floor. These are writhing, flattened, discarded lumps of manufactured metal whose long use is wrought across their surfaces. Anthropomorphic in the way they scuttle across the ground, they are also scuttled objects. On closer inspection, we understand them as discarded and crushed wheelbarrows, flattened by an unknown pressure. Are they on their way to becoming diamonds? Objects such as these have history. Whittaker’s piece speaks to the loss of value to the worker.
Mirroring Whittaker’s reference to mining, Jen Moore’s large construction Weighted Decay, with its dynamic diagonal struts and braces, resembles a tipple. Both might be monuments to obsolete historic structures of the tin and copper mining in the region. What is being brought up to the surface by Moore’s tipples? Are these cautionary objects that augur the future extraction of battery-grade lithium in the region?
In Diana Wolzac’s Living with Riddles, a wireframe elegantly funnels space; its conical form folds inside into outside and vice versa, like a diagram for a black hole. The colorful rendering of the latticework draws the viewer in, ensnaring them in the sculpture, catching one's eyes between the palette of primary and pastel colors. Like a shell, the taper drags the viewer down the form; we learn that this is a found object, a salmon putcher, an ancient trap to catch fish in the River Severn. The work is like the trap that it depicts, abducting the viewer in a game of retrieval.
Like Whittaker and Moore, Sandy Layton’s Entanglement asks us to draw out material and symbolic references. Warped and bent girder-shaped extrusions snake around a timber structure, making it unclear what came first. As we ponder the sculpture and attempt to back-engineer its evolution, we find that nothing in Layton’s work is frictionless, as the profile of each component is indelibly grooved and textured by the direction it has taken during its formation.
If the work of Whittaker, Moore, and Layton bridges gaps between the different positions of industrial and post-industrial material cultures, then Aileen Kelly’s and Kay Senior’s sculptures are a memorial to this present time zone. Senior’s nylon tent is decrepit, destroyed, and truly unmonumental. The colors leach through the charred and bleached surface, speaking of environmental fragility. Is this the product of a war zone, an artifact of tourism? Either way, it speaks of catastrophe and accident. Let’s Play is a sculpture that insinuates itself into the texture of the world, a truly volatile world.
Similarly, Kelly’s Unwanted Attention plays with smoke and mirrors as seductive materials are conjoined with abandoned ones. The reflection of glass in this propositional structure harks to a kind of architectural model that might be proposed for Saudi Arabia’s NEOM; Unwanted Attention becomes an appropriate object for a time of acute instability. It is cobbled together, pushed, and prodded into a state of animation. Facades and windows are duct-taped into uncomfortable, anxious relationships that project the catastrophes of their own making, like a magic lantern asking why elephants ever stomped down the high street of Penzance.
Locus Solus
In Tessa Garland’s video installation, eerie Super8 footage of an otherworldly coastal island is projected across two screens. The footage features handmade contraptions populating the beach, spinning and making the wind visible while marking time. The film repeats, with the spin of the wind chime and the framerate of the Super8 film coalescing to create a fugue state, placing the viewer in a form of lost time, mesmerized and trapped within the rotations and loops of the film. The colors on the film evoke another era—this is not a digital rendering, as the warm, cellular quality of the film stock emanates from the installation, sending the viewer into an anachronistic trance. If Garland’s films are a study in the construction of an alternative measure of time, then the collage of objects and images in Seona Myerscough’s Transceiver evokes an altogether shonkier form of time travel. Both artists twin Tremenhere with elsewhere, asking us to fall through the artwork as a portal.
A doorway into a vessel is a recurring motif in Andy Gomez’s graphite drawings. The drawing process itself is part of the image-making process, as the graphite powder is pushed around the paper and images emerge from scuffs and smudges. Relics and belongings fluidly emanate, and the viewer might marvel at the guiding principles that bring the imagery to the surface. I am reminded of the visionary scientist in Raymond Roussel’s Locus Solus, whose ingenuity is prolific as they create inventions of ever-increasing complexity and strangeness. Importantly, Roussel, like Gomez, employed an eccentric compositional technique to fashion a narrative that appears analogous to the format of Gomez’s reliquary drawings.
Literary references also play out in Tom Witherick’s drawings and sculptures, which he describes as love letters to the protagonist, Cosimo, in Italo Calvino’s The Baron in the Trees. After a family dispute, Cosimo climbs a tree and never touches the ground again, living an arboreal existence for the rest of his life. Witherick’s correspondence takes the form of loose wooden assemblages of model treehouses. Displayed like trophies and arranged across shelving, these conversations with Cosimo offer a form of sculptural vernacular that seems wholly appropriate for Cornwall. Similarly, Matthew Foster’s Compression, with its collage style and sensitive combination of handworked and smoothed wood, seems to speak to the Cornish landscape as seen through the eyes of Alfred Wallis’s driftwood paintings, which “seem to have grown out of the Cornish seas and earth,” as described by Ben Nicholson in 1943.
Postnature
In "Sentinel," Everleigh and Evans have created a totemic object and an accompanying silk drape in response to both material persistence and keystone species activity. Introduced in 1969 by zoologist Robert Paine, a keystone species is one that has a disproportionately large effect on its natural environment relative to its abundance. The archetypal "hyper-form" that Everleigh and Evans develop through a combination of design and research evokes the double meaning of the word "imago," which defines both an insect after metamorphosis and the idealized "mental" image. Everleigh and Evans intertwine these dual definitions in a convergence between aspiration and evolution, where the perfected vision in one's mind finds a parallel in a metamorphic process.
Material and symbolic mutations can also be found in Karen Byrne’s hybrid creatures, which combine toxic references of recycled polystyrene with dog-human amalgams. Titled A Philosophie of Phancie, Byrne refers to a more whimsical approach to interpreting the world, embracing fantasy as an essential element of philosophical thought. It underscores the idea that our understanding of nature and existence is not static but continually evolving through creative reinterpretation. Byrne’s blending of the amusing, comic, and droll with mutating forms challenges conventional boundaries and encourages a reimagining of the world where fantasy and reality coalesce, revealing deeper, often overlooked connections and meanings.
Similarly, in Tania Salha’s Creature of Habit (stuck pattern), the PVC folds in her sculpture signal both a rupture and a continuum, signifying how elements can be continuously interconnected while simultaneously allowing for breaks and disruptions that create new forms and meanings. Ian Dawson’s rescaling and re-tooling of a Mesolithic flint via a 3D printer conjoins cutting-edge technology with ancient tools separated by thousands of years. Totemic forms continue to be presented in Clare Jarret’s fired ceramic works, which invoke the menhir in Tremenheere, known as the "place of long stones." Cornwall sits on the Cornubian batholith, a granite formation from 300 million years ago, which was used by Neolithic settlements 299 million years later. A mere 6,000 years ago, there is evidence of barrows on the Cornish Peninsula, and now in Vivien Delta’s An Hourglass Doesn’t Know That It Is Running out of Sand, a pyre of bold black clay stacked with masked fragments evokes a visceral connection to ancient rituals and mythological narratives of the region, embodying the destructive and transformative power of fire.
People and things are entangled with each other. Humans make, use, exchange, modify, destroy, and deposit objects, and these objects in turn act upon humans. For Louise Nevelson, sculpture was the opportunity to "rehabilitate" banal materials into "another life." Objects come to places and go to places. In their transformations and exchanges, they become new things, take on new meanings, and create new situations. In Nicky Hirst’s "Out With Lanterns," we can witness the kind of rehabilitation that Nevelson aptly describes. It is not simply a matter of putting real objects into the work, or making work with real materials, as Ornella Novello demonstrates when her objects perform in a complex assemblage of parts.
Here in Second Nature, the artists don’t want their work to exist in isolation, separated and made exclusive, but to have a profound connection to reality and the conditions that create it. In Marcus Harvey’s sandcastle ceramic or in Katy Houston’s drawings and performances, there is a desire for ordinary daily life to be an integral part of art. The in-betweenness of the work represented in this unapologetically sprawling and tentacular show extends beyond the human and the natural into the liminal spaces that challenge thresholds and boundaries. The work in Second Nature makes a habit out of the handmade without disparaging the readymade. The works oscillate between representation and abstraction; they are serious and humorous, both complete and incomplete, often all these things at the same time. They prod the viewer and encourage deliberation on the complicated and imperfect aspects of life. The use and range of objects evidence that this work, like life, should be thought of much more propositionally. The work in Second Nature is not a style or theme; it represents an attitude of what a combination of individual and collective art practice can achieve.
Ian Dawson 2024
A Changeable Beast Exhibition
Curated by Tessa Garland
Catalogue Introduction
Involving thirty artists, the exhibition Second Nature is an ambitious, bold, and notable undertaking. It spans several years of conversations and planning by the group Changeable Beast. This collective of sculptors is connected by a shared concern for the process of making and its social relevance.
The exhibition delves into the intricate processes employed to craft something at the turn of the second quarter of the millennium, posing questions that must be grappled with. On one hand, there is a tradition to be shared, taking a passage from a 1959 conversation with Barbara Hepworth as a cue:
"Art at the moment is thrilling. The work of the artist today springs from innate impulses towards life, towards growth—impulses whose rhythms and structures have to do with the power and insistence of life. [...] In the past, when sculpture was based on the human figure, we knew this structure well. But today we are concerned with structures in an infinitely wider sense, in a universal sense. Our thoughts can either lead us to life and continuity or [...] the way to annihilation. That is why it is so important that we find our complete sense of continuity backwards and forwards in this new world of forms and values. I see the present development in art as something opposed to any materialistic, anti-human, or mechanistic direction of mind."
The landscape today continues to change as our collective memories are stored not on headstones but hard drives and the clouds that exist in our lexicon now process planetary-scale computation. However, Hepworth’s observation of an artistic pursuit that supports intuitive responses is one that the members of Changeable Beast recognize. How does one make effective decisions today when we are able to visualize damage on a global scale? Making art is all about decision-making: when to say yes or no, when to resist or go with the flow, when to make or unmake. It is only through practice that one can feel which decision is the right one to make and when. Is this the second nature that the show is themed around? The altera natura of habits ingrained through consistent practice produces a state where the act of doing has a clarity that cannot be gained in any other way. A second nature that becomes an intrinsic part of one’s character or behavior through repetition and practice is an interesting lens to consider the work of Changeable Beast, a collective that shares its knowledge and skills as a method of discourse.
The show was also conceived by the artists in response to the environment of Tremenhere and is a dialogue between the built and constructed and the natural landscape of Cornwall. Tremenhere Sculpture Gardens, located on the southern tip of the Cornish peninsula overlooking Mount’s Bay and the tidal island of St. Michael’s Mount, features an 8th-century monastery and fortified construction that sits upon a granite outcrop on the horizon line, communing with the changing environment. In a way, the view of the Mount from Tremenhere is metonymic of the artworks presented in Second Nature. When looking at St. Michael’s Mount, the viewer can contemplate the human endeavor of the object perched on the craggy outcrop and consider the combination of material processes utilized in its realization. The viewer is also thrust into imagining the deep time of the geological formations that provided the conditions for the outcrop to come into being in the first place, leading one to contemplate that the object and the environment cannot be disjoined from each other. But what of the sensation of viewing the Mount from afar during the changing light conditions of a day and through the landscape of Tremenhere? The onlooker comes to acknowledge the interplay of a whole constellation of elements, conditions, and things whereby the nature of one thing can only be thought of through its relation to an expanded universe of other things.
One such piece might be Alice Wilson’s Supra. As we peer through her framework, we imagine an external world while conceding that the imposition of the artwork has a demonstrable effect on the very environment it seeks to describe.
Living Surfaces
The work in Second Nature offers a unique dialogue with the material world. From one of the many vistas at Tremenhere, we look out toward Mount’s Bay and the expanse of water, which acts as a liquid medium that allows the island to glide and float, surrounding and framing it to create an image of sorts. From the vantage point of Tremenhere, this exemplifies how the surface of the earth might be thought of as an environment of images, where the world is made of material surfaces that produce and can be read as images. Life on earth occurs on these surfaces, on the thin upper layer like a piece of photosensitive film that reacts to the sun's energy.
The photographic work of Belinda Worsley makes the connection between the photographic formation of an image and the forms that plants take under lighting conditions, a parallel observed by Darwin. Meanwhile, the synthetic plants of Alex Hegazy evoke a vegetal surface that has already been recoated by the chemical industry. The surface carpet of lichen is another form of photosynthetic matter that Rachel Causer mimics in her biomorphic tiles. Causer creates these through a complex casting process, imprinting the surface with a furry texture reminiscent of mold. Causer’s panels merge the inscription on the surface with the tactility of the object, while Chuting Lee’s painted tree makes visible the bifurcation of branches on Norway Spruce cultivated and harvested on a Christmas tree farm.
In Tina Culverhouse’s Peaked to White, Three Flags, we might think of these as more than flags, but as living maps, diagrams, screens, and visualizations of living surfaces with Rorschach-style printed ink stains on their surface. Like Causer, the veneer is not flat but ‘shapeshifting’ as they undulate across the ground and interact with the shadows of trees like a photogram.
In Ellie Reid’s A Moment of Being, a glittering facade presents another aspect of the idea of sculpture as a living surface. Here, a sequined panel of reflective plastic discs shimmers in the breeze. Reid has embedded patterns into these surfaces that she has extracted from the Tremenhere landscape. Encoding them into a billboard, the panels are reminiscent of shop signs and, like Hegazy, challenge the idea of synthetic nature. The piece is situated at the intersection of the Pilgrim's walk, and Reid’s sculptures, like the others, are elastic enough to both merge with and stand apart from the terrain as they signpost and converse with old and new pathways across the landscape.
By exploring the notion of living surfaces, these sculptures challenge the difficult assumptions between the world we exist in and the world we write into—a knotty issue that Susan Young explores in her braided sculptures, which combine everything from thirty-year-old bank statements to ballet tights, banana skins, and dandelion seeds into knitted sinews that are woven together and cascade downwards, asking us to think about an entangled metabolic process.
Human Nature
It is perhaps a presumption of the Western canon that, for most of its history, sculpture has devoted itself to depictions of the body. We might come to doubt the veracity of such assertions, but the built environment is nevertheless populated by statues of some sort. Indeed, a century ago, sculptors routinely made a living from memorials and monuments. In Second Nature, we are confronted with several works that ask us to consider the fragility of human memory, what we might forget and recall, and how we might go about re-membering.
One such object is Carolyn Whittaker’s Regroup II, a stack of wrung-out matter, brutishly and unapologetically located on the floor. These are writhing, flattened, discarded lumps of manufactured metal whose long use is wrought across their surfaces. Anthropomorphic in the way they scuttle across the ground, they are also scuttled objects. On closer inspection, we understand them as discarded and crushed wheelbarrows, flattened by an unknown pressure. Are they on their way to becoming diamonds? Objects such as these have history. Whittaker’s piece speaks to the loss of value to the worker.
Mirroring Whittaker’s reference to mining, Jen Moore’s large construction Weighted Decay, with its dynamic diagonal struts and braces, resembles a tipple. Both might be monuments to obsolete historic structures of the tin and copper mining in the region. What is being brought up to the surface by Moore’s tipples? Are these cautionary objects that augur the future extraction of battery-grade lithium in the region?
In Diana Wolzac’s Living with Riddles, a wireframe elegantly funnels space; its conical form folds inside into outside and vice versa, like a diagram for a black hole. The colorful rendering of the latticework draws the viewer in, ensnaring them in the sculpture, catching one's eyes between the palette of primary and pastel colors. Like a shell, the taper drags the viewer down the form; we learn that this is a found object, a salmon putcher, an ancient trap to catch fish in the River Severn. The work is like the trap that it depicts, abducting the viewer in a game of retrieval.
Like Whittaker and Moore, Sandy Layton’s Entanglement asks us to draw out material and symbolic references. Warped and bent girder-shaped extrusions snake around a timber structure, making it unclear what came first. As we ponder the sculpture and attempt to back-engineer its evolution, we find that nothing in Layton’s work is frictionless, as the profile of each component is indelibly grooved and textured by the direction it has taken during its formation.
If the work of Whittaker, Moore, and Layton bridges gaps between the different positions of industrial and post-industrial material cultures, then Aileen Kelly’s and Kay Senior’s sculptures are a memorial to this present time zone. Senior’s nylon tent is decrepit, destroyed, and truly unmonumental. The colors leach through the charred and bleached surface, speaking of environmental fragility. Is this the product of a war zone, an artifact of tourism? Either way, it speaks of catastrophe and accident. Let’s Play is a sculpture that insinuates itself into the texture of the world, a truly volatile world.
Similarly, Kelly’s Unwanted Attention plays with smoke and mirrors as seductive materials are conjoined with abandoned ones. The reflection of glass in this propositional structure harks to a kind of architectural model that might be proposed for Saudi Arabia’s NEOM; Unwanted Attention becomes an appropriate object for a time of acute instability. It is cobbled together, pushed, and prodded into a state of animation. Facades and windows are duct-taped into uncomfortable, anxious relationships that project the catastrophes of their own making, like a magic lantern asking why elephants ever stomped down the high street of Penzance.
Locus Solus
In Tessa Garland’s video installation, eerie Super8 footage of an otherworldly coastal island is projected across two screens. The footage features handmade contraptions populating the beach, spinning and making the wind visible while marking time. The film repeats, with the spin of the wind chime and the framerate of the Super8 film coalescing to create a fugue state, placing the viewer in a form of lost time, mesmerized and trapped within the rotations and loops of the film. The colors on the film evoke another era—this is not a digital rendering, as the warm, cellular quality of the film stock emanates from the installation, sending the viewer into an anachronistic trance. If Garland’s films are a study in the construction of an alternative measure of time, then the collage of objects and images in Seona Myerscough’s Transceiver evokes an altogether shonkier form of time travel. Both artists twin Tremenhere with elsewhere, asking us to fall through the artwork as a portal.
A doorway into a vessel is a recurring motif in Andy Gomez’s graphite drawings. The drawing process itself is part of the image-making process, as the graphite powder is pushed around the paper and images emerge from scuffs and smudges. Relics and belongings fluidly emanate, and the viewer might marvel at the guiding principles that bring the imagery to the surface. I am reminded of the visionary scientist in Raymond Roussel’s Locus Solus, whose ingenuity is prolific as they create inventions of ever-increasing complexity and strangeness. Importantly, Roussel, like Gomez, employed an eccentric compositional technique to fashion a narrative that appears analogous to the format of Gomez’s reliquary drawings.
Literary references also play out in Tom Witherick’s drawings and sculptures, which he describes as love letters to the protagonist, Cosimo, in Italo Calvino’s The Baron in the Trees. After a family dispute, Cosimo climbs a tree and never touches the ground again, living an arboreal existence for the rest of his life. Witherick’s correspondence takes the form of loose wooden assemblages of model treehouses. Displayed like trophies and arranged across shelving, these conversations with Cosimo offer a form of sculptural vernacular that seems wholly appropriate for Cornwall. Similarly, Matthew Foster’s Compression, with its collage style and sensitive combination of handworked and smoothed wood, seems to speak to the Cornish landscape as seen through the eyes of Alfred Wallis’s driftwood paintings, which “seem to have grown out of the Cornish seas and earth,” as described by Ben Nicholson in 1943.
Postnature
In "Sentinel," Everleigh and Evans have created a totemic object and an accompanying silk drape in response to both material persistence and keystone species activity. Introduced in 1969 by zoologist Robert Paine, a keystone species is one that has a disproportionately large effect on its natural environment relative to its abundance. The archetypal "hyper-form" that Everleigh and Evans develop through a combination of design and research evokes the double meaning of the word "imago," which defines both an insect after metamorphosis and the idealized "mental" image. Everleigh and Evans intertwine these dual definitions in a convergence between aspiration and evolution, where the perfected vision in one's mind finds a parallel in a metamorphic process.
Material and symbolic mutations can also be found in Karen Byrne’s hybrid creatures, which combine toxic references of recycled polystyrene with dog-human amalgams. Titled A Philosophie of Phancie, Byrne refers to a more whimsical approach to interpreting the world, embracing fantasy as an essential element of philosophical thought. It underscores the idea that our understanding of nature and existence is not static but continually evolving through creative reinterpretation. Byrne’s blending of the amusing, comic, and droll with mutating forms challenges conventional boundaries and encourages a reimagining of the world where fantasy and reality coalesce, revealing deeper, often overlooked connections and meanings.
Similarly, in Tania Salha’s Creature of Habit (stuck pattern), the PVC folds in her sculpture signal both a rupture and a continuum, signifying how elements can be continuously interconnected while simultaneously allowing for breaks and disruptions that create new forms and meanings. Ian Dawson’s rescaling and re-tooling of a Mesolithic flint via a 3D printer conjoins cutting-edge technology with ancient tools separated by thousands of years. Totemic forms continue to be presented in Clare Jarret’s fired ceramic works, which invoke the menhir in Tremenheere, known as the "place of long stones." Cornwall sits on the Cornubian batholith, a granite formation from 300 million years ago, which was used by Neolithic settlements 299 million years later. A mere 6,000 years ago, there is evidence of barrows on the Cornish Peninsula, and now in Vivien Delta’s An Hourglass Doesn’t Know That It Is Running out of Sand, a pyre of bold black clay stacked with masked fragments evokes a visceral connection to ancient rituals and mythological narratives of the region, embodying the destructive and transformative power of fire.
People and things are entangled with each other. Humans make, use, exchange, modify, destroy, and deposit objects, and these objects in turn act upon humans. For Louise Nevelson, sculpture was the opportunity to "rehabilitate" banal materials into "another life." Objects come to places and go to places. In their transformations and exchanges, they become new things, take on new meanings, and create new situations. In Nicky Hirst’s "Out With Lanterns," we can witness the kind of rehabilitation that Nevelson aptly describes. It is not simply a matter of putting real objects into the work, or making work with real materials, as Ornella Novello demonstrates when her objects perform in a complex assemblage of parts.
Here in Second Nature, the artists don’t want their work to exist in isolation, separated and made exclusive, but to have a profound connection to reality and the conditions that create it. In Marcus Harvey’s sandcastle ceramic or in Katy Houston’s drawings and performances, there is a desire for ordinary daily life to be an integral part of art. The in-betweenness of the work represented in this unapologetically sprawling and tentacular show extends beyond the human and the natural into the liminal spaces that challenge thresholds and boundaries. The work in Second Nature makes a habit out of the handmade without disparaging the readymade. The works oscillate between representation and abstraction; they are serious and humorous, both complete and incomplete, often all these things at the same time. They prod the viewer and encourage deliberation on the complicated and imperfect aspects of life. The use and range of objects evidence that this work, like life, should be thought of much more propositionally. The work in Second Nature is not a style or theme; it represents an attitude of what a combination of individual and collective art practice can achieve.
Ian Dawson 2024
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Photo Credit: Steve Tanner
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