Dancing Mania

an Exhibition of Sculptures by Harriet Aston

Harriet Aston’s sculptures hang from the wall like exploded pods, or stand in precarious or impassive poses. Made of heavy, industrial paper, dyed, crushed and subjected to topological distortions, they explore paradoxes of weight and weightlessness. They draw in the viewer as they play with volume, shape, texture, and mottled or blazing colour.

Some free-standing pieces have the enigmatic quality of standing stones. Despite their appearance of stiffness and immobility, they are an outcome of collaboration in which the artist has worked with the tendency of the material to shift and crumple over time, allowing it to find its own points of equilibrium. Silvered and gilded patches or gashes on some of these sculptures break up the surface, sometimes causing light to bounce back and forth, and making the depth of the opening uncertain. Illumination seems to emerge from the inside the object, hinting at interior spaces which are left to the imagination of the spectator.

Some of the wall pieces are crushed, flattened and dense, as if they were struggling to assert their three-dimensionality, while others burst outwards in convoluted shapes, saturated with colour, challenging the viewer to make sense of their configurations, to separate foreground from background, and inside from outside.

The raw material of the sculptures has responded in unpredictable ways to the processes of dyeing, cutting and shaping, perhaps as a result of its previous history and function – depending on whether it has been stretched, doubled, exposed to water, or even left unused. Sometimes the effect is of weathering, sometimes of camouflage, while at others the viewer is confronted with exuberant, almost aggressive blushes of different hues. A kind of alchemical transformation turns industrial matter into glowing or muted surfaces, undulating, bulging, indented, sagging, endowed with an unexpected buoyancy or ponderousness.

These sculptures oscillate between poise and instability, between euphoric release and the forces of gravity; they are experiments with unpredictable powers of transmutation, which the artist has facilitated, without being able to control.