Dependent Rational Animals
Towner, Devonshire Park, College Road, Eastbourne, BN21 4JJ
13 July-22 September
From the Press Release
Consuming an entire gallery space, Dependent Rational Animals is an installation within an installation situating sculptures within paintings, and paintings within sculptures, by artists Sally Underwood and Roxy Walsh. In a play on scale and space, large-scale watercolour wall drawings become a backdrop for a towering timber-framed sculpture shingled with leather and a nine-sided igloo constructed from wood and wool. Within these soft shelters, smaller paintings can be looked at secretly and slowly, away from the open gallery.
Dependent Rational Animals is the first collaboration between Underwood and Walsh. The partnership began in 2012 as IGLOO in the off-site programme of NN Contemporary Art Northampton, developed further for Globe Gallery in Newcastle, and has now evolved into its most ambitious iteration at Towner.
The artists are interested in how sculpture makes space for painting and how paintings hold the interior of a sculpture. Their concept draws on unusual displays of paintings in museums like the Sir John Soane Museum where works are mounted on moveable panels, or Isabella Stewart Gardiner Museum where paintings project at right angles from the walls. The title of the exhibition derives from a book of the same name by Alasdair MacIntyre who perceives vulnerability as a central feature of human life. The “virtues of dependency’ that he sees as a necessity for individuals to flourish, are reflected in Underwood and Walsh’s collaborative working methods and the interdependence of the works in the show.
About the artists:
Sally Underwood is a sculptor who has exhibited in the UK and Europe including Gagosian Gallery, Sadlers’ Wells and Seventeen Gallery in London; and Station 21, Zurich. Roxy Walsh is a painter whose work has shown in the UK, Europe and the US including Galerie Peter Zimmerman, Mannheim; Annika Sundvik Gallery, New York; Temple Bar Gallery, Dublin and Milton Keynes Gallery. She has been awarded many residences and fellowships including in 2000 at the British School in Rome.
