On Cold Spring Lane
Assembly Point, 49 Staffordshire Street, London SE15 5TJ
05 Jul — 05 Aug 2017
Victoria Adam, Rebecca Ackroyd, May Hands, Hannah Lees, Ella McCartney, Amanda Ross-Ho and Marianne Spurr
On Cold Spring Lane is an exhibition of Victoria Adam, Rebecca Ackroyd, May Hands, Hannah Lees, Ella McCartney, Amanda Ross-Ho and Marianne Spurr, at South London artist-led gallery Assembly Point. Running from 05 Jul — 05 Aug 2017, this all woman exhibition explores an expanded view of materiality, featuring sculpture, photography and painting.
The exhibition leads with a quote from Jane Bennett, an academic who is known for thinking about materials in an abstract way, drawing expanded connections between people, places, objects, and ecology. Different related threads can be followed throughout the exhibition, each artwork leaning on different ideas of the natural and synthetic, the body and objects, actions and traces. There is an ambition and artistic play with materials that works in tandem with Bennett’s political analysis which seeks to expand, and even abstract, materials, their traces and layers of lived experience.
An expansive notion of materiality has obvious implications for the making of artworks, conceptually as well as formally. Everything in the exhibiting feels sculptural to some extent, notably with the photography and painting. Ackroyd’s large, imposing photograph depicts a person wearing guerrilla gloves to cover their crotch offering an immediate provocation – here the photography is as much a physical object as 2D representation, forcefully announcing its spatial presence as it looms over the viewer right as they enter the exhibition. Painting too, of course, often plays with the tension between mimetic representation and the sculptural qualities of form, weight, scale, and texture. Both Amanda Ross-Ho and Marianne Spurr invoke painting and the body, and more specifically, the body of a painter, suggesting notions of the handmade and labour. Ross-Ho’s work is a glove splattered with dirt and paint – it could be a working person’s glove, it could be a painter’s glove. It is oversized, almost the size of a person: the absurdity of this further abstracts it. Spurr has produced something more akin to a traditional painting, with the pattern of mark making obscured behind a linen stretched over a frame. The primacy of the stretched material over the paint performs a kind of removal of the painter’s hand, producing a smooth finish. There’s a repetition to this ambiguous patterning, as if it was machine produced – yet, it could be paint, it could be a stain: I initially mistook it for leaves and various other natural detritus.
While the photography and painting in On Cold Spring Lane advances a sculptural quality, the work of McCartney’s sculpture seems to a take a step back. It’s a wax and charcoal upright cylinder invoking a minimal, late modernist aesthetic. It’s small, barely reaching the waist. But it’s sleek, nondescript almost manufactured form contrasts with the use of natural materials in its construction. These materials releases a faint smell, evoking the body more indirectly and extending the aesthetic experience of the art object beyond the visual.
The works I’ve described are tracing edges of painting, photography and sculpture, but not in some linear progressive formalism, rather a broader reaching artistic attitude. The ambition of this attitude is expansive. While it conjures ideas of specific mediums or contexts, these are always rendered as unsteady boundaries. Tensions are evoked between certain materials and their contexts, such as the natural and the made, etc., and through these tensions the limitations, the horizons they suggest, dissolve.
Note on the word “materiality” and sculpture
I wanted to write this review because there was something in the way the artworks and the words of Bennett perform an expansion of materiality that is captivating. It’s not a word I want write, “materiality”. It’s insufficient, it’s jargon. In so many other ways, this review falls short of the artworks too. The expansion of thinking and seeing here is not something that can – or perhaps, should – be described, outlined, underlined or justified. The exhibition was very good, but crucially, more so than much of the well-made sculpture that I keep finding in galleries, that I enjoy for sure, but feels more like exercises in a very narrow demonstration of taste. The artists in the exhibition have taste, definitely. But there is another certain kind of sculpture I keep encountering, an of yet unnamed genre. It’s all minimal palettes, suggestions of a soft gradient, hints of nature, capital p Process, and the word materiality plastered everywhere. Everything is placed nicely and lit just right. The word “materiality” might be the wrong target, perhaps the problem is that it is all just too correct. I enjoy it, it’s hard not to. But that’s not enough. In On Cold Spring Lane the artists brought a lot of wit, energy and personality to the work, there was strong connections made between the writing of Bennett and the artworks as a whole, but enough deviations, misdirections and general points of uncertainty that I wanted to see more, many more exhibitions to pursue each thread.
Chris Hayes 