ÌÇÐÄVlog

The tenth in the series of Sculpture in the Close exhibitions was held during July and August 2007. The show included works by Claire Barclay, Christine Borland, John Gibbons, Roger Hiorns, Marc Quinn, Bill Woodrow, and Cerith Wyn Evans.

This outdoor exhibition in the grounds of ÌÇÐÄVlog combined new and existing sculptures and installations. The .

Artists and works

Claire Barclay is an artist whose work seems often to hover between the categories of sculpture and installation. In Glowing Promise, exhibited on a wall in an obscure part of the College, a significant aspect of the viewer’s experience is that of the distribution of attention, an experimentation with different lines of sight. Glowing Promise is an enigmatic installation that represents the skyline of Cambridge through a precise arrangement of miniature elements, evoking both a forgotten map and a camera obscura's projection. Positioned at a height that forces viewers to look up at a representation of a bird’s eye view, it creates a paradoxical experience of gazing up at what appears to be a small, graspable version of the monumental, culturally rich cityscape.

Christine Borland's work has shown a continuous preoccupation with the history of medicine and how it has influenced the way we see and understand the human body, especially in its relation to the way we conceive of the self.

In a previous exhibition, Fallen Spirits, Borland explored the symbolic significance of dead leaves from an oriental plane tree at Glasgow University, grown from a seed of the ancient tree under which Hippocrates is said to have taught. The current sculpture, Support Work, reproduces the support structure used to prop up this historic tree. The absence of the tree is merely incidental, in the sense that the centuries of meaning that have accrued to it exceed its physical form. This sculpture embodies the profound legacy of Hippocrates in the form of a botanical prosthesis, symbolizing the concretisation of the role of medicine.

John Gibbons’s exhibition features two works from his Presence series, characterized by brooding metal structures that create swirling patterns to entrap light and evoke a sense of contained power. These sculptures, with their monumental scale and tension between abstraction and figuration, blend archaic and modernist influences, recalling ancient traditions and the divine unknowability beyond human experience. Gibbons’s use of bright pigments and machine-like elements highlights the tension between humanity’s technological aspirations and the underlying, unseen forces that shape his work, suggesting a primary creativity that precedes human invention.

Roger Hiorns exhibited two works, Bunnies and Untitled Silver. 

Roger Hiorns’ art challenges viewers by engaging more than just their eyes, often involving their senses of smell and touch. Bunnies, a steel and fluid sculpture in Upper Hall, combines the rigidity of steel with the impermanence of substances like disinfectant or perfume, creating a physical and ritualistic interaction that goes beyond visual appreciation. This interplay between modernist form and sensory experience underscores a deeper engagement with art, inviting viewers to reflect on the contradictions between abstraction and sensory immediacy.

Hiorns’ new work next to the Chapel door features a rectangular sheet of silver that records the rhythms of entry and exit from the College’s historic and conceptual heart. The volatile silver reacts to atmospheric changes and inadvertent contact, making it a fitting medium for capturing our customary ways of inhabiting duration.

Marc Quinn bronze sculptures, derived from casts of frozen animal carcasses, confront the viewer withan invasion of meanings. But the viewer’s attempt to stabilise the meaning of each work through the context of tradition makes them complicit with a violent tension of the wretched with the desirable, and of meat in contact with spirit.

Lounging Figure (Rabbit), proposes a relationship with Rodin’s Balzac, whose authorship of La Comédie Humaine emphasised flesh rather than spirit. In emulating the monumental posture of Balzac, Quinn uses the rabbit’s exaggerated scale and bronze material to highlight its own vulnerability and resistance, thereby commenting on humanity’s complex relationship with nature and its technological exploitation.

Bill Woodrow exhibited two works: Rockswarm, Endeavour: Cannon Dredged from the First Wreck of the Ship of Fools.

The large sculpture Endeavour: Cannon Dredged from the First Wreck of the Ship of Fools challenges conventional interpretation by presenting a cannon that, while rooted in military imagery, fragments into various references like natural history and music, ultimately illustrating how military thinking overshadows diverse forms of knowledge and rendering the sculpture's meaning both complex and elusive.

Woodrow’s sculpture Rockswarm explores the turbulent moment of bee migration, highlighting the vulnerability of the utopian ideals of industry, cooperation, and loyalty that become vulnerable in the swam state of transition.

Cerith Wyn Evans’s work Time here becomes space / Space here becomes time forms a dynamic constellation of light and text. It is characteristic of his work, where shifting installations and textual citations from influential 20th and 21st-century thinkers create an ever-changing dialogue between material presence and language. His art transforms seminal ideas into objects, staging intertextuality and reflecting the subversive potential of language to challenge and redefine established forms of order and value. Through elements like palindromes and mirror texts, Wyn Evans highlights language's power to construct alternate realities that rival conventional interpretations.

Thanks and acknowledgements

We gratefully acknowledge the generosity of the sculptors in lending their work for this exhibition.

The 2009 exhibition was curated by Dr Rod Mengham, working closely with advisors Tim Marlow and Richard Humphreys. Several galleries and organisations have also given invaluable advice and assistance, especially White Cube, Corvi-Mora, The Lisson Gallery, Waddington’s, and Sculpture at Goodwood.