- Venue
- Camden Arts Centre
- Location
- London
Shelagh Wakely’s sculptures, installations and drawings occupy all the galleries at the Camden Arts Centre in a revision of her work; where the garden becomes a space for conversation between the artist and her contemporaries such as Susan Hiller, Richard Deacon and Alison Wilding.
This is a rare opportunity to examine the artist’s work in one place. The first gallery’s floor is almost entirely occupied by a weathered gold leaf sheet, the marks and tears appearing deceptively intentional. Next to it on a service trolley, Wakely’s sculptural objects make tangible the idea of impermanence and the inherent ephemeral of nature. Lychees, limes, prunes, aubergines, melons and pears are bathed in gold and left to decay, slowly becoming a ghost of themselves. Their temporality is asserted in their decomposition, which leaves the gold encasing intact.
Like a child experimenting with time and decay, the visitor discovers that in this case, everything that sparkles is gold.
Upon my visit, the turmeric installation in the second gallery had sadly lost its pungent aroma. Wakely used the spice to transform it into a delicate patterned golden rug, inspired by Baroque garden design. Nonetheless a vague smell lingers, surrounding the visitors and clinging to the walls of the gallery, a gentle reminder of curry and the exotic.
In the third gallery, there are delicate vessels or containers that seem to be made form the negative space of other containers, as if trying to articulate and limit the space within them. Their ephemeral nature is enshrined in the artist’s decision not to fire the clay, a conscious act against preservation and permanence. The vessels look close to disintegrating: a reminder of an archaeological find exacerbated by the curator’s decision to place them so close to the floor. The space is shared by some of her drawings, which compared to the elegant forms of her sculptural work, look more like insects squashed on paper or incohesive doodles.
The exhibition is an immersive sensual experience that emphasis the importance of temporality and the thresholds between states of being. Wakely’s work makes use of the forms of nature and with a surrealist edge, reminds us of the boundaries between what is and what was, between negative and positive spaces. Without pretentiousness, her delicate forms bear witness to the presence of absence. If the artist’s sculptures show us anything it is that everything changes, everything decays and nothing stays the same, with the exception perhaps, of gold.
*this review first appeared on thisistomorrow.info
