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felicity warbrick |
Figures do not
appear in Felicity Warbrick's work; it is devoid of the human form but resolutely
not devoid of human presence There is something fantastical that links her
soap sculptures with her paintings and drawings; the motifs of the fairytale
are present in all of them. In the paintings, the palace and the forest
both recall the settings of fairytales, but in Warbrick's work it in indeterminable
whether the action has happened already, is happening outside of our viewpoint
or is, indeed, still to happen. Angela Carter wrote that fairytales represent
'the most vital connection we have with the imagination of the ordinary
men and women whose labour created our world...'; this labour is what can
be seen in Warbrick's work; the ornamentation and design of a royal palace,
or a simple track carved through a forest.
Her soap sculptures reference ansculpture trait of myth, that of miniaturisation. Her buildings are all carved to the size dictated by a standard bar of soap regardless of actual building size; so a factory occupies the same footplate as a small bothy. There is something of the frustrated architect to this work (something she would happily admit); but not of bombastic city planning or drawing up an idealised town, rather there is just the pleasure of the form that building takes; be it northern European or American pitched roofs or the recognisable shape of an agricultural building. Her use of soap as the medium for these works resonates with a kind of 'make do and mend' approach to using what is most easily worked and to hand - and in turn references the traditional craftsmanship of sailors, in the form of scrimshaw, and prisoners with their epic constructions made of matchsticks. They provide something to marvel at, a cabinet of domestic curiosities at once fragile and robust.
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