Events
Rebecca Warren
The Main Feeling
The British artist Rebecca Warren makes sculptures, assemblages and constructions in a variety of materials including clay, bronze, steel and neon. She has said about her work that ‘it comes from a strange nowhere, then gradually something comes out into the light. There are impulses, half-seen shapes, things that might have stuck with you from decades ago, as well as more recently. It‘s all stuff in the world going through you as a filter...’
The Main Feeling, 2009, is a large, sparingly painted bronze sculpture of a female figure, the first of its kind in Rebecca Warren’s varied oeuvre. Standing on a tall pale pink plinth, the total height is over four metres. It is caryatid-like, the surface looking worn or weathered, or accreted like a stalactite, its contours in flux, as if always adjusting, in search of a still form. There are recognisable hands, a bow at the neck, a skirt, and suggestions of a face and hair. But there is only one foot – fused with a high blocky shoe – one leg, one breast, all centred on the vertical axis, as if seen in a distorting mirror placed at right angles along the central axis. It has the feel of a Pygmalion creation, struggling between different states of eruption, formation and being.