Gallery opening times:
Saturday 24th & Sunday 25th July, 11am – 4pm
Saturday 31st July & Sunday 1st August, 11am – 4pm
Preview: Friday 23rd July, 6pm – 8pm
Forkhandles is the latest show of work by two fifths of the JAMBON collective; Graeme Durant and Andrew Maughan.
For those of you not privileged with an upbringing of 1980’s BBC comedy (of the variety favoured by the best of our working class Grandparents) the title of the show refers to a sketch by the comedy duo The Two Ronnies (comprised of Ronnie Barker and Ronnie Corbett) in which a scruffy, thick-accented Barker walks into a traditional ironmongers and asks for an assortment of items including “Four Candles”. After rummaging through boxes, Corbett presents the four candles on the counter. A confusing altercation ensues, from which it eventually conspires that what Barker actually wanted was not “Four Candles” but “Fork Handles…’andles for Forks.”
Forkhandles is an irreverent play on words which gently alludes to a duplicity of possible meanings, and to a certain camaraderie; of the complementary characters of Durant and Maughan (a parallel to the Two Ronnies), under the spectre of nostalgia and class affiliations.
There are some obvious parallels between Durant’s sculptural practice and Maughan’s paintings; The seemingly instantaneous (but in reality, highly laboured) physical qualities, the way in which their work appears to embody fluctuating, convulsive or mutating states, the fine balance between figuration and disfiguring abstraction, their abundant concerns with materiality, indeterminacy, and the essential inadequacy of symbolization. But what is most interesting about this pairing is not simply the similarities, but the dialogue in which moments of both cohesion and dissonance – or slippage – take place. Here are two artists speaking in two languages (or dialects, sculpturally and painterly) to evoke an open-ended conversation which is full of irreverence, anxiety, and poignancy. Overall, this is going to be a show of spirited humour and serious endeavour, not to be missed.
Iris Aspinall Priest
As part of a wider audience development plan 36 Lime Street has recently developed a gallery space. A pilot programme of exhibitions and events, has been co-ordinated to run from May through to November 2009 which will encompass painting, sculpture, installation, drawing and three-dimensional design.
