Completed Sculpture: 'This S(c)eptic Isle': 'Sentinel 3 (Thank You For Your Order)' & Forthcoming Exhibition

All Images: 'Sentinel 3 (Thank You For Your Order)', Salvaged Cardboard Boxes & Tube, MDF, Acrylics,
Paper Collage, Adhesive Tape & French Polish, 124 cm X 60 cm X 60 cm, 2018  

Here’s the third of my ‘Sentinel’ sculptures.  The full title here is ‘Sentinel 3 (Thank You For Your Order)’ – the subtitle, this time, being extracted from a label affixed to one of the component boxes.

As with the other ‘Sentinels’ the stacked boxes also bear prominent snippets of text drawn from my ‘Below The Line / Beneath Contempt’ text piece – in this case reading, ‘…….Paradise awaits’, and, ‘Happy days are here again!’.  Those phrases probably suggest some of the counter intuitive, self-deluding optimism prevalent on one side of our current political debate.  However, they may also unintentionally allude to what, I now realise - is the slightly ludicrous aspect of this particular piece.

In truth, I probably hadn’t intended to create something with quite so much of the ‘comedy robot’ aspect about it, when I started – and something about those lateral appendages now appears a bit forced - and even slightly cheesy, to my eye.  Perhaps it’s just indicative of me realising the full potential of these box stacks to imply figures, when originally mocking-up this one – and consequently getting a bit carried away.  The real damage was probably done when I swapped the order of the two uppermost boxes, thus creating a slightly over-literal head/neck combo.  At the time, I probably justified the bent tube and long, angled box as fleshing the whole thing out formally (it did seem to lack a bit of volume without them) –but now I think we can all see I was mostly just 'sticking the arms on'.

Either way, it’s done now – and perhaps I shouldn’t be too po-faced about things like this.  It was always my hope that a strain of the ridiculous should run through my ‘This S(c)eptic Isle’ project, and if ‘Sentinel 3’ hardly counts as an example well-judged absurdism, maybe a bit of good, old-fashioned silliness isn’t wholly to be sniffed at either.  The occasional honest misstep, or lapse of ‘taste’ (whatever that means), is just part of a healthy creative process, I think - and something that far better artists than I might succumb to occasionally.  I’ve come to regard the five existing ‘Sentinels’ as a little community, whilst working on them - the hope being that each one might represent not only an individual voice, but also a slightly different temperament, when exhibited together.  Perhaps, if nothing else, ‘Sentinel 3’ can just find a rôle as the joker of the pack.

On the subject of exhibiting: all this work will actually be exposed to public gaze very soon, in another joint venture with my fellow artist friends, Shaun Morris and AndrewSmith.  The exhibition, next month - at Nottingham’s Surface Gallery, has been a long time coming, but is now creeping up on us pretty rapidly, as my long, hot Summer of blissful sculpting gives way to the inevitable phase of organisational scurrying.  We’ve been a little late in sorting out the publicity material this time, although everything is in hand.  In the absence of a proper visual notification, I can at least include some of the essential details here…

Notification:

The Show, entitled ‘Visions Of A Free-Floating Island’ will run between Saturday 15 September and Saturday 29 September 2018, at Surface Gallery, 16 Southwell Road, Nottingham, NG1 1DL.  There will be an Opening Event, between 7 – 9 pm on Friday 14 September, and an Artist Talk between 2 – 3 pm on Saturday 22 September (to both of which everyone is, naturally, more than welcome).  Full details of the gallery can be found here, but just be aware that they don’t open on Mondays.  I will, of course, put more formal notifications of the show up here, once they're available.

Right - must crack on…