- Venue
- Victoria Miro Gallery
- Location
In this installation Sarah Sze takes gaudy domestic dross and forms it into fantastic ecosystems of the everyday. Presenting an expansive landscape of densities and tension, where fuzzy felt scraps swarm over pieces of timber amidst an archipelago of strange industrious campfires. Like a series of miniature workshops, desk-lamps illuminate a careful array of tools and experiments, where the arrangement of the equipment might be the only obvious form of production.
Sze plays with the audience, requiring an unexpected level of physical intimacy with the work as you are forced to step over bright woollen threads, trails of pigment and precariously balanced regiments of upturned nails to view the most intricate parts of the installation.
Upstairs the relationship to the architecture of the gallery becomes more explicit as the installation reaches up in places to puncture the datum of exposed girders that form the notional ceiling of the gallery. Glimpses of these matchstick structures are revealed by the tendrils of orange power cables that drop between floors from one encampment to the next. In one place an intimate den of domesticity is formed from a dense arrangement of laundry goods and skeins of wool, which hunker-in beneath a swoop of pages from an exercise book, tacked together with bright blue sticky tape to form a textile structure that brings her delight in make-do inventiveness to the fore.
The simplest and most elegant juxtaposition here is formed by a series of elongated twigs held upright, pinched tight between the beaks of heavy rubber-tipped clamps. Sze uses wool, cables and the air currents produced by numerous desk fans, to link the various dense moments of the installation. Unpicking the sense of these connections feels cursory, there is no real pleasure in finding individual connections, it is the overriding feeling that there is sense to be found amidst the tangle that matters. At its best the viewer experiences synchronously, the intimate dense moments of personal industry and the reassuring but depersonalising infrastructure of the expansive system of order.
