Manifesto

A whitened wooden skull, a half-open mouth in the hollow of a dense burl: some forms leave the eye with an unease that no received category can hold, and the dominant culture has learned to look away. Ordinary aesthetics has no word for this zone. Obscenity, though one might suspect it, plays no part.

ÜGLY Sculptures occupies that threshold. The brand crosses the ugly as a passage, without claiming it as provocation. At the end of the passage, a denser presence appears, one that yields itself only at that price.

The founding gesture is direct carving. The work proceeds through subtraction and opening, sometimes through sheer discovery when a cavity happens to open. The figure precedes the tool: it was waiting in the wood long before the chisel, in the root long before the hand that recognises it. The sculptor releases the figure more than he creates it.

This gesture points back to an older idea, the bricoleur as Lévi-Strauss theorised it. The artist practises it in the present tense: he works with what the forest abandons, with the stone the ground releases. “I spend all my free time raiding the fields, the streams, the parks and the railway lines, and I never cut down a living tree,” he wrote in 2020.

The corpus unfolds vertical columns, a handful of emergent heads, sometimes an intimate diorama. Sacred figures form a third vein, rarer. Skeletons surface from the wood, animals too, every so often a hybrid creature, with the self-evidence of things that were already there. In this grammar, the cavity operates as active volume on the same terms as mass.

The vocabulary is that of commercial horror: skeletons and skulls, ghost ships, troubled anatomies. The difference is precise and lies in the quality of the emotion.

Horror aims at immediate fright. Slow unease works elsewhere: it settles in, alters the gaze, and in the end leaves a trace. One recognises here the register of the memento mori, continued in a present vocabulary. Comfort has no place in it by construction.

The work converses with Tim Whiten, Catherine Heard and Shary Boyle, in a tone close to slow unease. With Alexander Calder, the kinship operates at a more structural level: a feel for material acquired outside the art schools, and a learned primitivism nourished by non-Western traditions; in both, the scale runs from the diorama to the standing figure at human height. The central filiation remains that of the noble bricoleur in the Lévi-Straussian sense, which places both artists in the same family of gesture.