State of Play: Various Artists

The ‘boom’ series is a fusion of two divergent references to function. Firstly, civil engineering – a concern with high-visibility, safety, barriers and other types of controlling devises. Secondly, musical instruments – developed using the tonal quality of strings placed under tension. Stripped of utilitarian function, structures such as barrier booms, bollards and safety gates are re-evaluated for their physical properties and their assertive aesthetics. They are also repurposed sonically via attached musical instrument components. The resulting forms resonate more intensely when struck, creating an additional sound, voice, or purpose.

Gary Hume’s Wonky Wheel sculptures are imperfect, wheel-like armatures rendered in stainless steel and brightly coloured enamel. The Wheels are grouped and individual but part of a whole. The economy of line and slightness of shape, make the wheels appear to balance precariously, vulnerable to the slightest touch or influencing action. Together, they reference an imperfect wheel of life and conceive a carnival of time and a ‘wonkiness’ of both personal and historical experience, whose narrative, though inevitable, is never stable.

The word earth as a definition, has the paradoxical connotation of being microscopic and macroscopic simultaneously – too small to inspect and too large to view. MONOLITH [A Brief History of Earth] is reminiscent of a community sign or a business park map, illuminated to garner attention like a warning, but with no navigational agency to any geographical location. Here, however, and especially amplified by its context, it is perhaps a different kind of map – or even a fantastical time machine – to an inner recognition of how far we’ve broadly (and locally) disconnected from the microbiomic, ecological, pre-anthropogenic earth state, and to consider how alien-an-idea it might be for one to inhabit this space now.

The RedHead Sunset Stack captures a bit of the awe that seeing a beautiful sunset inspires in Almuth Tebbenhoff – reduced to the form of a large toy-tower. At the centre the artist put a ragged and unstable human experience in pink and orange which is sandwiched between the steady blue earth and the red sun cubes. The earth and sun may be the only constants we have and even here we are at the mercy of incomprehensible forces.

Jesse Pollock has memories of making daisy chains at school, piercing the stem with his thumb nail and weaving another through, they would pretend to get married, wearing the garnet on their heads. This sculpture, however, is about nostalgia as a disease. The flowers are swollen and weeping at the seams like an infected wound, each one forced into the next. Chain, from a distance is a gleaming portal to the countryside, a rose-tinted view on the past but up close its drenched in frustration and reality.

oh-OH is a simple gesture – telegraphing the memory of a wedge of swans swimming on open water – using the most economical means possible. The form recalls minimalists like Judd, but there is a humour and pathos which counters the reading of this as austere minimalism.

Red Sentinel / Yellow Sentinel stand watch, ready for action, almost transforming into enlarged playing pieces that are set to engage with the landscape they sit in. Referencing structures found in West’s CGI video work, they continue his exploration into notions of gaming, role playing, purpose, work and labour.

(Wel)come Back, (Wel)come Home is composed of two metal replicas of paper “banners” which you might see on your return to either an office or home respectively. Some of the letters appear to have been torn or lie on the ground, having fallen from the “string”. This “damage” to the banners shifts the mood of the work to one which is altogether more desperate than the whimsical tone of that originally intended. Thomas has described the works as marking some of the post-pandemic shifts and realignments between the environments of the office and the home and their increasing interchangeability, asking what it might mean for us to sacrifice parts of our most personal and intimate spaces for the comfort and economic benefit of those who employ us.

Manifesting as three interconnected lines of enquiry: two-dimensional drawing, projection and sculptural installation, Amba Sayal-Bennett’s practice explores performative dynamics within human and non-human assemblages. Her recent work focuses on instruments of measurement, from astrolabes, compass, to Jantar Mantars. These curious, ancient, other-worldly calculating machines enabled the observation of astronomical positions with the naked eye through an assemblage of measuring device, celestial and human bodies. An instrument is a human and non-human assemblage, a system created by the body working in conjunction with a material structure or object. Within Sayal-Bennett’s studio practice, whether she is using a plastic drawing stencil in her works on paper, or three-dimensional computer modelling software such as Rhino, she is interested in how instruments, apparatus and materials have agency.

This new ‘micro landscape’ draws upon one of the earliest garden forms, the Paradise Garden; a sacred environment often symbolised in Persian rug design. In our increasingly denatured age which is struggling to find a balance with the ‘more than human world’, The Isle of Everywhere re-imagines this ancient edenic vision as an environment where the highly artificial is fused with the living to present a new garden hybrid. In Heywood and Condie’s latest horticultural installation, living nature, high tech, and commodity fetishism collide to realise a contemporary hybrid paradise – a metaphor for our globally insecure attitude to the natural world in a garden of unearthly delights.

The Reset Button is an object to be sought out and found. Usually somewhat hidden in location so as not to reset by accident. To reset seems to imply a fresh start, a new beginning. To reset a game, a device, a place, the day, a moment. There is a permanence to the idea – are you sure you want to do this? It is fraught for this reason; on the other side, a chance to restart can promise hope and opportunity, a fresh start. The term reset has some uneasy associations in covid times, ‘the great reset’ a phrase used by technocrats and populists alike to describe the coordinated policy and monetary response to the coronavirus pandemic. The reset button here tries to represent all these things: subtle, unassuming, hard to locate, multi-faceted, 2022.