Taking Shape. Sculpture on the Verge.

Taking Shape traces the through line that connects a body of work. Understanding an artist’s practice as constantly evolving, this exhibition presses pause to present sculptural works and consider the conditions of their own (im)possibility and the promise of their potential.

The artists selected for Pangaea’s Autumn residency, Byzantia Harlow, David Rickard, Emily Motto, Jamie Fitzpatrick, Matthew de Kersaint Giraudeau and Revital Cohen & Tuur Van Balen, exhibited works during this four-day exhibition that anticipate the projects they were to develop over the residency period, which ran from October to December 2015.

The exhibition celebrates alternatives to the ‘just-in-time production’ that is running roughshod over contemporary work and life. What are the options to this frenetic cycle of make-ship-repeat? To what extent is there still demand for gradual innovation and slow specialisation: obsessive depth instead of spreading breadth? What are the possibilities of bucking the pancake flatness that threatens to suffocate us with its dull genericism? This exhibition explored these and other topical issues with the express purpose of insisting on an alternative approach to sculptural production, one that traces progressive understanding as it iterates across a practitioner’s artworks, accumulating through their practice.

The exhibition considers sculpture as a dynamic process that takes shape in material form and is then made meaningful through its encounter. This is energised by the history and ambition of the art form’s particular questions, comments and concerns. Taking Shape foregrounds these by way of an ‘enquiry on the move’. It celebrates sculpture as it evolves and is recontextualised through the respective practices of the seven participating artists and their work together as a cohort-in-residence.

Notably, Pangaea Sculptors’ Centre chose not artworks but artists for this exhibition and set them a shared task: to each re-present and/or reconfigure a recent three-dimensional artwork so that it draws attention to the conditions of its own (im)possibility —the terms of its current existence and promise of its potential as it foregrounds what will be produced during the residency. The works displayed presented an opportunity to think carefully about the role of sculpture today, especially its potential for thoughtful transformation as an antidote to just-in-time production.

More about the artists and PSC’s Autumn Residency Programme.