20th March 2008
The Alexia Goethe Gallery is proud to present Jodie Carey's first London solo show. Her work focuses on the traditions of ritual, artifice and mortality in contemporary Western Society. Transforming the gallery, these large scale sculptures and installations use candle wax, newspaper dyed with blood, tea and coffee, feathers, antique furniture and casts of over 3,000 human bones.
For this exhibition at the Alexia Goethe Gallery Jodie Carey will show five sculptures ranging from 2-4 metres in height, built as a series of towering assemblages. A combination of the found and the hand crafted coalesce to create physical still lives with strong ecclesiastical and ritualistic overtones. Reproduction furniture such as display cabinets, chests and tables are stacked high, festooned with ornate constructions of individually hand crafted paper flowers and feathers. The ephemeral nature of the newspaper connotes a fragility and brings a temporal context to the work. Large church candles left to burn right down leave behind their wax residue, marking the passing of time. The assemblages evoke a desolate, transitory beauty, underpinned by an engagingly absurdest eccentricity.
The work ruminates on perceptions of mortality informed by notions of ritual, religion, and the Sacred, continuing the themes of ceremony, death and artifice that thread consistently throughout Carey's practice. The monumental scale is juxtaposed with the intimacy and intensity of her obsessive craftsmanship. The use of craft, skill and time transforms lowly materials into the wondrous and spectacular. Carey offers beauty whilst simultaneously confronting us with the ugliness of life. An installation of casts of human bones occupies the upstairs space, archived on shelves the gravity of their presence is compounded by the inert and solid remnants of the human form consummately stacked in the centre of the room.
