MONUMENTAL

In the 2007 catalogue for a posthumous retrospective of the work of the Brazilian sculptor Lucia Noguera, the late Guy Brett wrote of a long-standing anti-monumentalist trend in British sculpture. He liked Cornelia Parker’s exploding shed and he gave the monumental short shrift. “Ponderous”, “weighty” and “self-important” were the words used. Not quite right, though. The monumental may have a lighter, wittier and more graceful aspect, too. The monumental might not have to be outdoors, either, or in any public building, because memory (which is what a monument is about) can always be a private affair.

On show at Centre for Recent Drawing are drawings on paper that envisage sculptures, with three-dimensional "drawings" then modelled after those ink-penned plans. This particular drawing room isn’t exactly somewhere to retire to. It’s an art that pushes decoration to the fore, that prods at local style for some awkward answers.?These new artworks are to prove an idea of drawing in three dimensions, something developed over years of teaching at London Metropolitan University with C4RD’s director Andrew Hewish BEM - a riff on the editor and critic Rosalind Krauss’ theorized extension of art medium in her well-known 1979 essay Sculpture in the Expanded Field.

Let’s not expand drawing's field here in the way we might have come to expect. So, no strands of wire or thread cutting through negative space from floor to ceiling. No immaterial shafts of spotlight to perform as lines on a darkened wall. Let’s land instead on drawing’s old convention of the monochrome to test out sculptural monumentality. What does the third dimension of a drawing sculpture do to an interior, exactly? What sort of plasticity can silhouette achieve? How might an ‘objet’ in front of a white wall behave as drawing in an era that prefers installed identity??

Lost function acts well as “plinth” in a regular formal scheme of sculpture here, to deploy outmoded outlines that serve a long-missed purpose. Old ashtray holders, jardiniere stands, secondhand side tables and occasional furniture, reproduction items that once belonged in millions of living rooms and hallways - all late attempts on the two-centuries-old aesthetic of the Regency aristocracy. Surfaces are covered with folk art marks, to press the buttons of the British class system. These plinths support shapes of an inert or animal abjection: stuffed black or white cones or cushioned domes studded with short wires or pearl-headed pins; balanced cairns of upholstered velvet ovoids; stones for a rock garden, painted black or white and dotted with ink.?

Monuments like these are very much reminders, of course. Memorials to a social history, meant for the domestic interior. Commemorations of otherwise unremarked times, of a less obvious modernity, that broad and powerful river which runs in parallel with art’s grand narratives.

MONUMENTAL, an exhibition of 2D and 3D drawings by Rosemarie McGoldrick

C4RD (Centre for Recent Drawing), 2-4 Highbury Station Road, LONDON, N1 1SB

Exhibition open 2.00 - 5.00 pm on the following dates in June 2023 (THU to SAT) or otherwise by appointment.

15-17 June | 22-24 June | 29 June-July 1