DAVID THORPE – LOVED UNDERGROUND
2016-06-27Naming the exhibition ‘LOVED UNDERGROUND’, David Thorpe presents a series of new pipeline sculptures and wall-hung fresco panels. Worked from the inside out, both series are rendered from scratch by hand using non-synthetic materials (mud, natural dyes, bone glue, slack lime, hazel branches, casein).
Thorpe’s pipe sections either form pairs or stand alone. Cradled intermittently along the gallery walls, there is the sense that they are somehow in waiting, and that this particular constellation poses only a moment within the patient and steady collation of a growing arsenal. Whilst still wet and pliable the pipes’ mud surfaces are worked into intricate patterns from forestry: leaves, branches and flowers twist and swirl around the pipes’ outer layers shrouding them totally as labour past congeals to become a glorious camouflage-like protective skin for the future.
Also wrought from the Earth’s base materials, Thorpe’s vivid frescos are in this way for one not of the Italian type. Picturing instances of spiralling spiked branches and robust wild fruits they sharply envisage a hybrid and fecund world, and one defiantly unknowable at that, where plant, animal and human engage in a strange yet joyful dance. With Thorpe’s unequivocal rendering that stretches colour to the very tip of each and every bud, life in this instance at least, is lived unfettered. It seems almost inevitable that the more this amalgamated world grows and summons its strength from that, or becomes, the further it moves away from the glare of human civilisation and its constraining will to categorise.
Opposite – Absorbed Labour in Love Touching, 2016
Exhibition runs through till July 30th, 2016
Meyer Riegger
Friedrichstrasse 235
D-10969 Berlin
Germany
