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14/4/2008

Jodie Carey

Alexia Goethe Gallery, London

The Alexia Goethe Gallery is proud to present Jodie Carey’s first London solo show. Her work focuses on the traditions of ritual, artifice and mortality in contemporary Western Society. Transforming the gallery, these large scale sculptures and installations use candle wax, newspaper dyed with blood, tea and coffee, feathers, antique furniture and casts of over 3,000 human bones.

For this exhibition at the Alexia Goethe Gallery Jodie Carey will show three sculptures ranging from 2-3 metres in height, built as a series of assemblages. A combination of the found and the hand crafted coalesce to create physical still lives with strong ecclesiastical and ritualistic overtones. Reproduction furniture such as display cabinets, chests and tables are stacked high, festooned with ornate constructions of individually hand crafted paper flowers and feathers. The ephemeral nature of the newspaper connotes a fragility and brings a temporal context to the work. Large church candles left to burn right down leave behind their wax residue, marking the passing of time. The assemblages evoke a desolate, transitory beauty, underpinned by an engagingly absurdist eccentricity.

The work ruminates on perceptions of mortality informed by notions of ritual, religion, and the Sacred, continuing the themes of ceremony, death and artifice that thread consistently throughout Carey’s practice. The monumental scale is juxtaposed with the intimacy and intensity of her obsessive craftsmanship. The use of craft, skill and time transforms lowly materials into the wondrous and spectacular. Carey offers beauty whilst simultaneously confronting us with the ugliness of life. An installation of casts of human bones occupies the upstairs space, archived on shelves the gravity of their presence is compounded by the inert and solid remnants of the human form consummately stacked in the centre of the room.

At once political and personal, it marks Carey’s increasingly universal treatment of the modern malaise, broadening her earlier focus on the ceremonious ostentation of Middle England through her large baroque-inspired chandeliers (Untitled, 2006) made of hoover dust that was painstakingly rolled into tiny balls and then fixed to curved wire frames. Carey: “Hoover dust is the detritus of everyday life. If you die tomorrow, all that would be left of you would be in your Hoover.”

The processes involved in the creation of the work for this exhibition is equally labour intensive, some sculptures taking as long as six months to complete. However, the outcome is of breath-taking shrines that herald both the ritual of mourning and the intranscience of life, playing on the perception that traditional memorials have an opposite effect to their intent: “There is a perversity in that once you commemorate something, it is far easier to walk away. It’s not lest we forget, it’s more lest we remember.” Jodie Carey
Short Biography [For CV click on the name below]

The work of Jodie Carey was exhibited at Hauser and Wirth in Zurich and in the group show Anticipation, curated by Kay Saatchi at David Roberts Gallery in London. Carey graduated in Fine Art from Goldsmiths College in London in 2005 and completed her MA at the Royal College in 2007.

Alexia Goethe Gallery
7 Dover Street, London

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