Lost is Found
The exhibition does as it says on the tin, transforming the ephemeral and the previously discarded objects found in everyday life into profound feature sculptures illuminating through the objects themselves and what each artist has created.
The exhibit presents the work of nine artists, based in the North of England, and is comprised of sculptures, photography and drawing that aim to rediscover the splendour of objects that have lost their pazazz by adding dimension from the artists personal reflections into their identities, childhood memories and desires.
An installation that has the desired Lost Is Found effect is Andrea Booker’s Spilt Milk. Booker has reincarnated the discarded sign components from demolished buildings to embody the comment they represent in the environment they come from in an expanding urban society; the installation is a successful presentation of the transitory nature of inner city living.
Richard Proffitt’s Louisiana Blues, Anywhere installation has a similar impact on the beholder. Proffitt takes the fleeting nature of life and incorporates it into the permanence of machinery, using a sheep’s skull, fake fur, wood and a moped. The jagged edges of the sculpture have an ominous effect but never the less it represents the combination of life and the man-made as an expression of our modern world.
To the more obscure and less obvious in the collection are Emily Speed’s egg, nest, home, country, universe, in which Speed presents the duality of life and buildings using eggs with depictions of buildings enforced onto the surface. Instead of being the nest-egg one might presume them to represent, Speed aims for the sculptures to portray the home as a physical container of the memories that hold the history of those who live there.