A QUIET MUTINY

Daphne Wright’s work quietly addresses the human condition and the important stages of life we all pass through, that are at once poignant and mundane. In this exhibition, over two gallery floors, Wright creates worlds that are beautifully eerie: familiar objects from everyday life come under the artist’s scrutiny including buggies, houseplants a fridge and a child’s drawing. Expanding on her existing sculptural practice, Wright focuses on the materiality of dry, unfired clay creating a dichotomy of familiarity and fragility. Wright’s objects are chosen for their momentary quality, these objects are only fleetingly valued in our daily lives.

Wright continues her examination of the human condition in a series of small abstracted creatures rendered in clay. Guttural and primordial they stand mutely together on metre-long shelves. Wright was prompted to produce these condensed sculptural objects by observing the obsessive craze for collectible figures amongst her sons and their friends.

Collecting is often an intense but transient phase most children pass through but leave behind as they mature. 

This is how children learn about categorisation which is further reinforced by schooling and society. Wright explores the essence of what collectibles represent to children as transitional objects on the path to adolescence, one of the interim states that are the core concern of her practice.

In Shopping Trolley, Wright focuses upon our daily humdrum visit to the supermarket and the drudging push of the trolley in our modern-day quest for to gather food. Wright reduces the trolley, a ubiquitous symbol of consumerism, to its essence. The bare structure, basket and baby seat, underlines the potential fractures and stresses created within this fundamental task– one very often associated with a woman’s role of managing budgets and young children simultaneously.

Wright is also concerned with boundaries and explores the liminal and transitory areas of life, the cusp of childhood and adulthood, which her sons have now reached, as well as the borderline between life and death. Drawn by the artist’s young son and realised by the artist in compressed clay dust, a stab victim lies on the gallery floor. The fragility of the materials used is poignant and disturbing, and this is underscored by the boy’s cartoonlike depiction of his peer, whether fictional or real, being slain in a sadly all too common occurrence.

In the video Is Everyone Ok? we see an older man in poor health with his face brightly painted like a lion who bears the mental scars of a career spent in middle management. Calling out team-building clichés, he intersperses these with personal responses to queries about his wife’s health. The effect is unsettling as he resides at the interface between work and retirement, usefulness and redundancy. A second video Song of Songs poignantly investigates the relationships of care adults have with more vulnerable family members. A man holds the hands of an elderly woman in a pose taken from a classic lovers’ death scene in opera. The power struggle between the actors is palpable as they sing a kind of elemental duet exploring jealousy and long-term relationships. The woman chews and creates dissonant sounds not familiar coming from an older person– all the time, the male figure aids and accepts her noises and movements.