ISABEL YOUNG
FICTIONS
An exhibition by Gary Clough & Isabel Young
The Cello Factory 33-34 Cornwall Road, Waterloo, London, SE1 8TJ
Exhibition Open: 12.02.20 to 15.02.20; 12.00-18.00
Private View: Tuesday 11.02.20; 18.00 to 20.00
Press Release
The evolution of human intellect and material existence can be traced through the endurance of the artefacts left behind. Objects that populate the practices of Clough and Young in ‘Fictions’ span geological time and many centuries across continental distances. The global products of manufacture and culture that converge in Clough’s drawings battle with ancient rocks and scaled maquettes of Young’s expanded paintings, in an interplay that no longer binds objects to their birthplace or taxonomy.
Drawing as an engine for the imagination allows for the ordering (or reordering) of spaces and things. Draftsmanship in Clough and Young’s work functions as a hypothesis weaving fictional realities and postulating invented worlds. In Clough’s perspectivally drawn assemblages transcription is betrayed in favour of fabrication where artefacts are combined, hybridized, compressed, into a singularity that levels hierarchical value. Young’s works are equally speculative. Despite originating from AutoCAD drawing and the laser-precision of architectural model-making, they remain proposed and unbuilt, as Clough’s remain intangible and unsculpted. Neither the original, nor the outcome will ever exist.
Both artists inhabit the inert and hand-crafted universe of the still life - one of nearness, confinement, entombment – where objects accumulate as captives in a labyrinthine mausoleum. ‘Fictions’ is an exhibition mimetic of a Wunderkammer construction of the mind. Through the conduit of infinite leitmotifs (airplanes, machinery, priceless vases in Clough’s drawn vitrines together with the vernacular furnishings and architectural components of Young’s interiors), a narrative and re-imagining multiplies in a space of acute scrutiny, subsumed by the production of artifice and fiction.