Towards is pleased to present Unreliable Objects an exhibition featuring work by Jen Aitken and Liam Crockard.
Consisting of both drawing and sculpture, the work in Unreliable Objects emerges as a response to conditions and limitations the artists employ to help govern the subsequent decision-making process.
For Aitken, this involves a restrained formal vocabulary that she develops through a continuously evolving set of rules. Marks are made intuitively, but conform to a pre-established framework. The drawing surface is persistently reworked as webs of lines are concealed and new marks take their place. This layering and the traces of previous marks create spatial depth and establish a visible and tactile history within each piece.
Crockard’s All Thumbs series evolved out of his interest in “readymade” as well as his back-ground in collage. The earliest forms of the series were constructed from off-cuts sourced from a local trade-school and dumpster diving behind a theatre company near his studio. This found material is then reconstructed into different versions of the most ubiquitous of all design objects – the chair. Through this process, Crockard sets both material and conceptual restraints as a way to complicate and extend the possiblities of making.
Connected through an immediacy and an intuitive way of working, both Aitken and Crockard privilege a kind of experiential and material knowledge, both in the making and the viewing of the work.
