DEEP-ROOTED THINGS

Daphne Wright: Deep-Rooted Things is the latest in the Ashmolean NOW series of exhibitions of new works by contemporary artists that relate to the Museum’s historic collections.

This exhibition by Irish artist Daphne Wright (b. 1963) created in partnership with Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin, features several new sculptures including the major new work 'Sons and Couch', in which she returns to the subject of her children, now on the brink of adulthood, that she last portrayed on the cusp of adolescence in 2014. It is presented alongside 'Fridge Still Life' (2021) and other recent works, which are placed in dialogue with works from the Ashmolean’s collection.

Wright’s sculptures meditate on passing time, the transience of life and, in the sculpture of her two sons, the forging of male identity. The work continues a series that started in her work 'Sons' (2011), the earliest of the sculptures of her children when they were on the brink of adolescence, and continued in the subsequent 'Kitchen Table' (2014). In 'Sons and Couch' the centre of domestic life has moved from the kitchen table to the living room couch where the bodies have grown, perhaps out-grown their space, and are once again on the brink – a moment of latency, anxiety and possibility captured and rendered solid.

Whilst spending time at the Ashmolean, Wright was drawn to the plaster casts in the Museum’s Cast Gallery where the sculptures frequently take the young adult male as their subject, representing ancient and pervasive ideals of masculine beauty as epitomised by athletes, heroes and Gods. The show opens with a cast of the surviving fragments of a metope from the Temple of Zeus in Olympia from the Ashmolean’s collection, showing a young beardless Hercules defeating the Nemean Lion in the first of his Labours, just starting out on his violently heroic journey through adulthood.

Wright also places one of the few paintings by a woman artist in the Ashmolean in the gallery space alongside her own works. Rachel Ruysch’s ‘Forest Floor’ Still Life of Flowers features a seasonally impossible combination of poppies, marigolds, convolvulus and fruit blossom, all captured on the cusp of dropping their first petals, with a butterfly – another emblem of life’s fleeting nature – alighting momentarily on a bloom. An even more evidently deliquescent bunch of flowers sits on top of Wright’s 'Fridge Still Life' (2021), a recent work shown here for the first time. In contrast to the hard and robust jesmonite of Wright’s casts, this is one of the latest in a group of works made by the artist in unfired clay, a material with which she has been working for the last 15 years. Fridges are intended to slow down the effects of time but they are also strangely intimate and revealing personal spaces. Here Wright invites the viewer to consider what is revealed by the oven-ready chicken, drinks bottle and five asparagus spears that sit forlornly in the fridge’s interior.

Several works, or series of works, in the exhibition speak directly to both the domestic and the museum, and in doing so continue the exploration of time, memory and identity. The way in which domestic objects carry memories and meaning is central to Wright’s series 'Plates' made by pressing clay between two plates, with each plate decorated with ghostly, faded memories of familiar patterns. A different response to the museum is suggested by the group of wall-hung sculptures of animals taken from collectible posters that once came free with the Guardian newspaper and hung on the bedroom walls of Wright’s children. The urge or need to collect and to categorise is as much the preserve of the child as it is the museum curator, and Wright’s carefully arranged 'Pet Amphibians and Reptiles' and 'Pet Rodents and Rabbits' squirm off the page in their low relief three dimensionality as if trying to escape such categorisation while also realising the familiar childhood fantasy of the image come to life.

The last work in the exhibition pulls together many of its recurring themes. The mysteriously named 'Ugg' (2019) presents 18 strange amorphous objects on three shelves. These might be a museum display of ancient artefacts and vessels, models of internal organs or the maquettes of a modernist sculptor. In fact, they are based on a collection of small plastic figures – Moshi Monsters – collected by the artist’s son when they were the current playground craze, only to be discarded when a new trend came along. The strange lumpen presences of 'Ugg' sit on their shelves suggesting some lost, forgotten and only partially understood world.