Low Life is an exhibition about animal instincts, about mischief, otherness, and rebellion, explored through the work of two contemporary artists: Derrick Guild and Katrin Moye.
Katrin Moye is a ceramic artist in Nottingham whose work combines a deep knowledge of European ceramics with social commentary and a sharp wit. The sculptures in Low Life respond to the increasingly dark technocratic times we live in by looking to the world’s natural rebels and troublemakers for inspiration. The drunken raccoon found passed out after raiding a liquor store in Virginia appears as the subject of a large Italian Renaissance-inspired panel. A zoomorphic jar presents a moldwarp or mole, bane of landscapers, ruiner of lawns. An accompanying vase has a flock of pigeon heads poking from it, the many that dominate our city squares in search of our crumbs. Plants also make their appearance, the dandelions and weeds that obstinately frustrate the perfectionist gardener presented as beautiful subjects in a brightly glazed Della Robbia-style roundel. All represent small acts of defiance by animals and plants following their instincts and staying true to their nature, no matter what civilization throws at them. Katrin’s stylistic references look to European ceramics from the Renaissance to the Romantic period, high culture where the theme of nature overpowering civilization was a common motif as shorthand for the ephemerality of life. Katrin, however, uses it with warmth and humour, as a beacon of light in dark times:
“The reminder that all of us will ultimately return to the earth, and there’s nothing we can do about it; and that nature comes back the minute we stop attempting to control it – these are weirdly comforting thoughts for me in all the man-made chaos that is swirling around at the moment.”
Derrick Guild is a Scottish artist whose paintings create surreal and playful connections across the historical canon of European art. As well as referencing antique portraiture, the works in Low Life look to the tradition of animal painting that documented the rare and the exotic or distinguished specimens as the possessions of wealthy owners. One painting brings together the head of Oudry’s ‘Clara the Rhinoceros’ with a lover’s eye excerpted from a van Dyck portrait. Paulus Potter’s painting of a bull also appears adorned with a lover’s eye drawn from an Ingres work, an unsettling human gaze that amplifies the psychological potency of the antique work it references. The large cassowary portrait, again echoing Oudry, is inspired by Walter Rothschild’s collection of exotic beasts at Tring Park. His fascination with these birds and other animals, expressed sometimes as scientific study, sometimes by treating them as exotic playthings, speaks of the peculiar responses that animals can excite in our nature.
The striking ‘otherness’ of exotic animals when presented in portrait as if they were important people highlights how, through anthropomorphism, painting can probe the deeper animal instincts of the human viewer. The Potter bull painting is transformed by the addition of udders into an androgynous hermaphrodite echoing a freemartin bull-heifer. Two groups of lovers’ eyes mix elements from human and beast; a larger installation contains bull’s eyes alone. In isolating these elements and then connecting them in arrangements Derrick teases out the curious psychological resonance of the animal portrait. They trace the oblique connections between beast and human, wild nature and society, the savage and the sophisticate, and capture how animal urges lie just beneath our surface like a sketch beneath the paint.
Low Life opens on Thursday 15 October, 6:30 – 8:30pm. To receive the PDF preview catalogue shortly before the exhibition opens please register via the ‘Request PDF Catalogue’ link above.
