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1/5/2003

The simple truth

Norwich Gallery, Norwich

The simple truth is in the corner. The simple truth is pastoral dissonance. The simple truth is in locality. The simple truth is a habitual rhythm. The simple truth is that sometimes all you get from looking at something is proof that it exists.

Desmond Brett’s work is concerned with the adaptation or misuse of materials and objects; the propping, leaning, tucking, fastening, weighting involved in making do. Structures are frequently bound with tape or string, surfaces often worked with plaster and lacquers and found objects are incorporated so that his sculptures appear to have been made with whatever was close to hand. For The Simple Truth Brett will work within the gallery’s architecture to make new sculptural works from a collection of objects arranged to depend upon each other and the structure of the building for support.

Mark Edwards photographs the immediate landscape, the grass, reeds and debris at the fore. Lonely, cultivated patches of earth give way to uncertain paths, fringes of shrub and bush interrupt the horizon and on the muddy grass floor there is occasional evidence of human intervention. The works in this exhibition belong to a series of photographs taken in the corner of allotments, where the plots end and another kind of land assumes their tone. These places have a strange serenity, a bastard peace, a quality of landscape in spite of themselves.

Robert Filby’s sculptures masquerade as discarded matter or cast-offs on the studio floor. Familiar forms are re-made according to Filby’s palette, a wurst-like shape is cast in plaster and painted terracotta, confetti-like leaves are cut from pastel foam. These objects appear in photographs as part of a constructed narrative in which the sculptures are encountered by pet animals in a white space. Occasionally bemused, frequently unaffected the animals convey a kind of empty, mediocre experience, apparently aware of the work’s shelf-life as art in the gallery space. For this exhibition Filby will create as new series of sculptures and cat photographs incorporating graphic fonts.

Chloe Steele’s work seeks out eccentric repetitions and appropriations in banal, architectural forms. Dancing Waters is a day-tripper video of a low-tech water spectacle at an amusement park near Great Yarmouth. A crowd watches jets of water relay across a small stage as a coloured light sequence and dramatic classical soundtrack play out. Steele’s interest in this kind of local leisure assumes an earnestness in a series of pencil studies of a static caravan park in East Anglia. Mid-tone, mannered drawings picture shaded corners of the park in low season, the caravans arranged in rows as sleepy capsules floating between clipped lawns and leafy branches.

Image: Mark Edwards

Norwich Gallery
St. George Street Norwich. Norfolk NR3 1BB UK
Open 10.00 to 5.00 Monday to Saturday

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