Jamie George
Lack, installation view, SE8 gallery, London, 2022
Above & below: Lack, series installation view, pigmented plaster.
Lack X (III), 2022, pigmented plaster, details views.
Detail of Depend, 2022, plaster, clothes rags, bolts, fixings, scaffold clamps and matting spray.
Installation view of Depend, Magazine (Withdrawn) & Magazine (Discard).
Installation view of Magazine (Discard), Magazine (Slip), Magazine (Ends), Magazine (Consumption)
Magazine (Euphoria), resin, matting spray and shredded documents, including: Images from Naples, printed from a smartphone on a university account. Notebook (unknown date, possibly 2017), photocopy of a conversation with Franz West entitled Euphoric Sculpture (2009), unread.
Magazine (Slip), resin, matting spray and shredded documents, including:
Institutional outdoor furniture catalogue, notes from an artist talk (date unknown, possibly 2011) and university course brochure.
Magazine (Ends), resin, matting spray and shredded documents, including:
Late council tax payment reminder from January 2011, tax receipts, and unopened bank letters from 2008
Farewell, plaster, clothes rags, bolts, fixings and scaffold clamps
Lack X (V), pigmented plaster.
Above, cabinet view (details below) of collected objects, including a Limestone block from a carving starter kit (ordered from Amazon, 2020). Ceramic arms bought from Via San Gregorio Armeno, Naples (2022). A handmade metal object purchased in a flea market in Athens (2019). Discarded ceramic pots found in a pile in Karachi, Pakistan (2012). Photographic print of a hole in the desert in Oman (1973). Several concrete casts of a dental model of an unknown person’s teeth, plaster original purchased on eBay (2014).
Press Release: The exhibition Lack by British artist Jamie George introduces a group of new sculptures and texts. Over the past decade, his practice has explored enactments of loss and breakage, be this in the making processes of the work or the personal and cultural narratives explored in the work. Casting is a key process in his sculpture, embedding and transforming reclaimed cultural and personal materials, while writing remains a fundamental aspect of his practice. Though perceived as distinct disciplines, the artist nevertheless emphasises the link between shaping material and writing or editing text, using gestures of reduction or stripping away.
Lack, a series of wall-based cast plaster works originating from the iconic design of an Ikea float shelf, also titles the exhibition. The work denotes loss of function and a breakdown in the surface through vandalism and wear from handling. By hanging the shelves vertically from the gallery walls the artist signals the passage from use-value to display-value, moving from the consolation of purpose to the uncertainty of representation.
The architecture of the gallery serves as a testing ground for the artist’s interventions. Plaster rods and arches are bracketed together with scaffolding clamps, bisecting the room, an arrangement that is echoed by a related work in the external yard, drawing attention to the subtle distinctions between inner and outer space. Cracks and fissures in the surface of the individual plaster elements reveal tightly wound pieces of coloured fabric that further destabilise the structural integrity of the fragile sculptures.
The exhibition is completed by works from the Magazine relief series, comprising resin sheeting material derived from silicone casts of waste, aggregated over time from the artist’s environs and personal life, and then compressed into strata.
For the artist the doubling action of casting might be said to chime with the writer’s use of referencing or quotation, seeking kinship with things that already have a place in the world – though such actions also extend the distance between an original and its remembrance, emphasising a process of entropy.
SE8 Gallery October 2022, se8.gallery