JULIAN WILD/ OWEN BULLETT - MAKE DO

12th July to 17th August 2008

Tom Rowland Fine art at V22 ASHWINSTREET is delighted to bring together works by Julian Wild and Owen Bullett. Both artists are deeply engaged with the relationship between craft and their practice and manipulate their knowledge of material to push the sculpture to its physical limits.

For "Make Do" Wild has created a new series of ceramic and glass sculptures. The ceramic work ‘Gestalt' depicts a composition frozen on the brink of collapse, hoop shaped objects are stacked up upon one another reaching almost 2 metres in height. Moving away from rigid geometric structures, these new pieces flow freely into heaps and piles. The floppy glass forms look like lolloping rejects from a 1960's glass factory. Each work is self-ordering; Wild creates the initial shape then allows it to settle or balance naturally among the other shapes, allowance for the physics of the material and its interaction with its environment determines it's form.

Though Wild's sculptures appear to be precisely balanced in an uncertain moment, they are secure, ergo, revealing another layer to the work. The final stages of the work- firing, glazing and finishing consolidate the structures undermining their appearance of fragility. Allowing the sculptures to find their form through the very nature of the material, the final stages see the artist's hand once again in securing and solidifying the object. The glazes and colours used by Wild reference the history and development of the material. The giant heap of glossy orange elements from ‘Gestalt' refers to the finish of 1970's West German pottery and the extruded works appropriate the glazing processes used in sanitary-ware invented by Ideal Standard otherwise known as "Bog Standard".

Wild's work depicts a long and furious engagement between the artist and his material, a constant battling between the artist's hand and the material produces objects that depict a narrative within the process as well as the final result. Owen Bullett's practice is embedded within this same intensity between artist and material; however where Wild is playing with chaos and order within his material Bullett is playing with these within his construction.

Shifting focus from the physical balancing of hand-crafted forms in Owen Bullett's previous work, for this show at V22 his investigation has broadened. Still on a human scale and highly crafted, the objects created are less introverted; the centre of balance has shifted a little. The forms now explore the walls as well as the floor and do not restrict themselves to the confines of a single room. The pieces travel through the architecture of the gallery, physically appropriating the spaces in which they are shown.

Derived from Bullett's interest in constructing 3-dimensional forms from 2-dimensional materials; the work slides between scales. Giving a physical form to the invisible waves which constitute our world, the work's layered structures suggest the strata which in turn geologically constitute our world. The painted surface which travels along each individual piece unifies the layers and describes the overall tempo of each work. The complex wooden constructions serve as vessels for these brightly coloured forms, the simplicity of which provide a contrast to the busy grained surface of the exterior of the works.

This intensity of play between material, artist, composition, craft and balance in both Bullett and Wild lends itself to a body of work which is poised in a cinematic moment ‘revealing all' on one visual plane. ‘Make Do' plays on just that, allowing the craft of the work to appear to be simply suspended in these individual moments.