ARTIST TALK: Saturday 31 May, 11am BOOK PLACE
Messums is pleased to present a new exhibition of sculpture by Tom Waugh at our London gallery, 28 Cork Street. Waugh’s practice is an exploration of materiality and trompe l’œil, centred around his ability to meticulously translate disposable objects into stone. The exhibition ‘Future Remains’ considers permanence and impermanence, geology, fossilisation, manufacture, pollution and waste in 11 new works from the artist’s studio, each painstakingly hand-carved from a variety of stones.
In Waugh’s hands, a block of limestone becomes a crushed polystyrene coffee cup; a traffic cone is hewn from three types of marble; and a gleaming white plastic fork, scaled to the size of a trident, protrudes like Excalibre from a lump of rock. His focus is the discarded, broken remains of mass-produced objects that would ordinarily be considered unworthy of close inspection; items which escape our scrutiny and blend unnoticed into our daily existence. Yet Waugh spends hours, days, weeks and months studying every crease, dent and surface texture in their form, recreating each idiosyncrasy of the original object with virtuosic skill. By carving these pieces – often on a monumental scale – in materials that have been almost exclusively allocated to the province of high art and ‘important’ subject matter since ancient times, he elevates their status to something worthy of close attention and, in doing so, highlights the throwaway culture of our society, and our disregard for these objects, which are in may ways remarkable, forcing the viewer to consider their own experience of these ubiquitous articles in their everyday lives.
