Artist: Kathy Dalwood

Click on images to enlarge. Size includes any frame.

In this on-going collection, found, mass-produced plaster and ceramic figurines – mostly post-war – are transformed and monumentalized through the process of re-casting in industrial black concrete. In the transformation, the whimsicality of the originals is replaced by a weighty solemnity, reminiscent of 18th and 19th century public sculpture, a reference further emphasised by the monochrome medium - imitative of bronze and stone memorial statues - and by their placement on monolithic-looking plinths.  The figures assume a new identity without their coloured and decorative regalia, becoming ghosts of their former selves.

Evidence of seams, mould lines and flashing characteristic of the mould-making and casting process and evocative of large-scale civil engineering projects, are deliberately retained, giving the figures a rough rawness, again at odds with the delicate, carefully detailed originals.  Placed in groups or ‘tableaux’ the figures seem to engage with each other, despite the variations in scale, and a strange rapport and sense of theatricality arises.

CV