Elephant In The Room: Douglas White Sculptural Fixation

Douglas White - Artist & Sculptor

He said,
“I locked you in this body”
“I meant it as a kind of trial”
Leonard Cohen – Lover, Lover, Love

“While traveling in East Africa in 2001 I came across the remains of an elephant. There was little left as it had been mostly scavenged. All that remained were a scattered arrangement of bones and its vast deflated skin, draped and folded like a collapsed tent.

The image of that scene has always stayed with me. It was a visceral encounter. Here was a body become landscape, a body both present and absent in which the distinction between the inner and outer had evaporated in the heat and decay. It was a body you could walk through.

I’ve always worked with material that was discarded or overlooked. But of all those objects that I ever encountered, this is the one I wanted most to possess, though how and in what way, I could never define or understand. It was, of course, a found object that was impossible to retrieve and probably for that reason, this dead and distant form has haunted me since. Shades and echoes of it have instead emerged elsewhere my work, in assembled hunks of trees that resembled parts of an elephant or the draped, melted skin of a vandalized plastic bin and most recently while I was building clay walls for a cast… As I worked a rolled-out slab of clay it begin to crease and crack and it became, in my mind’s eye, elephant skin… After so long I felt, at least in part, able to recuperate something of this strange, lost encounter and of the unreasoned desire for this abject form’
Douglas White

New Skin for an Old Ceremony is Douglas White’s third solo show at Paradise Row.

White is a sculptor whose work is and is about, transformation, the transformation of materials, transformed states of being and the transformative potential of objects.

He works with the discarded and the lost, both materially and mnemonically, seeking, through the alchemy of the creative act, to recuperate value and perhaps to fix, in the material form of his work, for a while at least, time and memory – an exorcism incarnate.

In this exhibition White presents a series of large sculptures formed of expanses of skin-like, manipulated clay draped over armatures.

Douglas White - Artist & Sculptor

In collaboration with Tristan Auer, Douglas White will produce a specially commissioned work from the Dark Moon series for this exhibition at Artcurial.

Intérieurs 2011 – L’art de vivre avec l’art est une exposition organisée par le magazine AD et Artcurial, révélant au public les tendances de la haute décoration.

Après le succès de la première édition en 2010 qui réunissait 10 décorateurs autour du style français, forte d’une fréquentation de 10 000 visiteurs, la manifestation met cette année en scène le talent de 12 décorateurs.

Douglas White - Artist & Sculptor

In co-operation with one of Denmark’s largest and boldest art collectors, ARoS has selected works from his substantial collection of international contemporary art. The exhibition “CON AMORE – the Leif Djurhuus Collection” presents museum guests with important works of art, in the view of a passionate art collector.

The international exhibition “CON AMORE – the Leif Djurhuus Collection” will give visitors to ARoS Aarhus Art Museum a unique glimpse of the extensive collection of international contemporary art of one of Denmark’s largest art collectors, Leif Djurhuus. The collection does not possess any particular overall characteristic; it merely reflects one man’s love of art, and consists of bold art purchases made with the heart.

“CON AMORE – the Leif Djurhuus Collection” in the Special Exhibition Gallery will show approximately 200 works of art, selected in close collaboration between Leif Djurhuus and ARoS, and plucked from a collection of more than 2,000 works.

Douglas White - Artist & Sculptor

Summershow

Douglas White - Artist & Sculptor

Black Sun, Kevin Kavanagh Gallery Review

Douglas White - Artist & Sculptor

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Douglas White - Artist & Sculptor

“It is impossible, then, that sight can be the mother of this art.” Herder

And elsewhere in Sculpture:

“Consider the lover of art sunk deep in contemplation who circles restlessly around a sculpture…He shifts from place to place, his eye becomes his hand and the ray of light his finger, or rather his soul has a finger that is yet finer than his hand or the ray of light. With his soul he seeks to grasp the image that arose from the arm and the soul of the artist. Now he has it! The illusion has worked; the sculpture lives and his soul feels that it lives. His soul speaks to it, not as if his soul sees, but as if it touches, as it feels. A cold description of a statue no more offers us appropriate ideas than would a pictorial representation of music; better to leave it be and pass by.”

Maybe this last sentence tells us the most, with its comparison of senses and its appeal to a consideration of all the senses and to a psychosomatic view of the person as intellect, feeling and body, and as living in the world in this way. At the same time there is an appeal to the idea that an artwork is a living thing, a thing almost like us.

Schmücker – About the senses, and the issues of seeing and touching and sculpture and material:

“I wonder if it’s different for people who have no experience with a certain material, and for people who have a ‘learned’ or some other experience with material. I for example don’t know what the dust on the moon feels like, I can only assume. Neil Armstrong knows! Or I don’t know how heavy a bowl of molten bronze is, I never lifted one – whereas somebody who works with this material knows exactly how it behaves. I simply wonder how this influences perception. Material knowledge is also really important for burglars and forgers. Can you tap a wall and tell me its thickness?”

Michel Giroud, writing about Jacques Villeglé’s torn poster pictures says that what the torn poster ‘paintings’ of Villeglé and others do is confront normal painting, re-enforcing those which have genuine visual ideas, and showing up those which are merely ‘rhetorical’. I think Schmücker sees her artists as doing something similar with regard to sculpture: they make us look at other sculpture and see its sculptural qualities. My point here of course is that Villeglé ‘s work consists of raw, found material – it’s very much about the idea of the material, and the material producing, almost of its own accord, the ‘meaning’. For that reason I think the comparison apt.
……
(Excerpt from David Lillington, Freies Material, April 2011)

A limited edition multiple with work by all artists and a text by David Lillington will be made available for €120 / £100 at the opening and throughout the exhibition. Please email Martina Schmücker: tina.2@gmx.de if you would like to purchase a multiple.

The exhibition is supported by the British Council

Douglas White - Artist & Sculptor

“Traditionally, good comes from above, from heaven, while evil rises out of the earth. But with the first aerial bombardments, we learned that evil primarily inhabits the sky and rains down on the earth. And thus a certain ambiguity in relation to the heavens has developed. Not only at the level of the individual subjectivity of the artist, but in the consciousness of the masses as well.”Boris Groys

Angus-Hughes Gallery presents ‘All Hail’, the third of three exhibitions curated by Lee Maelzer.

All Hail features five artists using a variety of media in an exhibition about the sky and its connotations, good or evil. Some paint from an aerial viewpoint as though hovering at the rooftops or the horizon line. In other works there is an allusion to the sacred implications of stretching skyward. They explore electrical storms, atmospheric shifts and religious symbolism. The magic and mystery of what is, or is imagined to be above us: clouds and the heavens, birds or bombs.

Douglas White - Artist & Sculptor

NEXT Visit, Berlin

Douglas White - Artist & Sculptor