Laurent Delaye Gallery
6 May till June 4, 2011

Laurent Delaye Gallery presents an exciting new series of work by Steven Geddes, who started his life as an artist in 2004, in his mid thirties, after a successful career as a fashion designer.  It was his encounter with the ceramicist Colin Pearson and the Pearson family that suddenly gave him the desire and opportunity to work with porcelain.

“I fell in love with the medium due to its fine qualities and translucency. My inspiration comes from many sources, not least the Scottish Highlands where I spent a great deal of my childhood.  I am also influenced by other cultures and have a fascination with the ancient and modern. A body of work was created around Mexico and the Day of the Dead.

I looked at the beauty and reverence that Mexicans placed upon the human skeleton and used this with a touch of humour with such things as swimming caps and goggles. Now I am looking again at Mexico, Sierra Leone and Ancient Greece and the Gods of Death and Life for inspiration. I travelled extensively last year and have created a body of work reflecting this. “

In this new series the cultural fusion is stronger than ever: in a series of figurines all periods of history seem to meet at once and suggest African, Mexican, or Mesopotamian sculptures amongst others.  They come less from appropriation than from a possible universal media-scape –, and browse freely through times and cultures.

They also echo the birth of Modern Art itself, but the associations extend to our uncomfortable, yet familiar, alienations, as Abu Ghraib figures creep up to the surface amongst the mythologies, the second skins, the flayed figures, and the diverse, personal, and subjective transferences. Behind the figurative decoy is the abstraction of the vessel, the ancientness of hieratic forms, and their familiarity with today’s tales.  The object in porcelain, as for a millennium, is here to give them incarnation.

Address:
Laurent Delaye

First Floor

11 Savile Row

London
W1S 3PG
United Kingdom
Gallery: +44 (0)20 7287 1546

Opening Hours: Tuesday to Friday 11am - 6pm
Saturday 11am - 4pm
 
Image Credits:
1. Steven Geddes 'Grecian Punk' porcelain sculpture photograph by Cameron McNee