The Shock of the Now Issue 59
Featured Exhibition Text
Jack Killick
Solo Exhibition
Lungley Gallery
19th October 2022
After a frantic and frenetic Frieze week, when it’s easy to become emotionally and mentally overcome by art and its accoutrements, it seems fitting to finally be physically overpowered and overwhelmed by sculpture, as is the case with Jack Killick‘s latest solo exhibition at Lungley Gallery. Filling the first floor of Fitzrovia’s 53 Great Portland Street, the site-responsive installation is calmly claustrophobic, its size and scale determined by the space it seeks to occupy and inhabit. Think Frieze’s secret stockroom, a sculptural storage facility, the overcrowded apartment of an overzealous collector or a high-class hoarder’s labyrinthine lair. You can barely enter the room itself, before carefully navigating the warren of piled plinths and stacked sculptures.
Each sculpture’s shape or silhouette is born from Killick’s engagement with automatism, art-making that allows your subconscious to take the creative tiller, their forms emerging from absent-minded scribbling or scrawling. Occasionally familiar or figurative, often abstract and irregular, although patterns arise intermittently. Their improvised inception is reflected both in their medium - employing inexpensive, accessible, almost household materials (plywood, plaster, cardboard and scrim) - and their making - honest, open and on display. The plinths too, far from their made-to-measure custom counterparts, are characterful themselves, providing an asymmetrical environment for their sculptural companions to explore.
Killick has spoken previously about his attempts to replicate the imagined experience of living within an artwork, and there is something strangely satisfying in submitting to this installation’s sculptural dominance, as if Alice post-indulgence in an 'Eat Me’ or ‘Drink Me’ invitation, shrunk to a sixth of your usual size, trapped within an art world Wonderland.
After a frantic and frenetic Frieze week, when it’s easy to become emotionally and mentally overcome by art and its accoutrements, it seems fitting to finally be physically overpowered and overwhelmed by sculpture, as is the case with Jack Killick‘s latest solo exhibition at Lungley Gallery. Filling the first floor of Fitzrovia’s 53 Great Portland Street, the site-responsive installation is calmly claustrophobic, its size and scale determined by the space it seeks to occupy and inhabit. Think Frieze’s secret stockroom, a sculptural storage facility, the overcrowded apartment of an overzealous collector or a high-class hoarder’s labyrinthine lair. You can barely enter the room itself, before carefully navigating the warren of piled plinths and stacked sculptures.
Each sculpture’s shape or silhouette is born from Killick’s engagement with automatism, art-making that allows your subconscious to take the creative tiller, their forms emerging from absent-minded scribbling or scrawling. Occasionally familiar or figurative, often abstract and irregular, although patterns arise intermittently. Their improvised inception is reflected both in their medium - employing inexpensive, accessible, almost household materials (plywood, plaster, cardboard and scrim) - and their making - honest, open and on display. The plinths too, far from their made-to-measure custom counterparts, are characterful themselves, providing an asymmetrical environment for their sculptural companions to explore.
Killick has spoken previously about his attempts to replicate the imagined experience of living within an artwork, and there is something strangely satisfying in submitting to this installation’s sculptural dominance, as if Alice post-indulgence in an 'Eat Me’ or ‘Drink Me’ invitation, shrunk to a sixth of your usual size, trapped within an art world Wonderland.
Each sculpture’s shape or silhouette is born from Killick’s engagement with automatism, art-making that allows your subconscious to take the creative tiller, their forms emerging from absent-minded scribbling or scrawling. Occasionally familiar or figurative, often abstract and irregular, although patterns arise intermittently. Their improvised inception is reflected both in their medium - employing inexpensive, accessible, almost household materials (plywood, plaster, cardboard and scrim) - and their making - honest, open and on display. The plinths too, far from their made-to-measure custom counterparts, are characterful themselves, providing an asymmetrical environment for their sculptural companions to explore.
Killick has spoken previously about his attempts to replicate the imagined experience of living within an artwork, and there is something strangely satisfying in submitting to this installation’s sculptural dominance, as if Alice post-indulgence in an 'Eat Me’ or ‘Drink Me’ invitation, shrunk to a sixth of your usual size, trapped within an art world Wonderland.
