'Governance', 2008/9 Medium: MDF, Polyfilla, road sign, black flock. Dimensions: 1m wide x 0.9m deep x 1.9m high (40"x35"x75")
www.richardducker.com
By evoking the language of the monumental, through covering found or made objects in concrete, the work explores my fascination with memory, displacement, and the elapse of time. Through this private stories can be suggested with the associative prompts of the found object in conjunction with the made form. This balancing act between the made and the found object, and their associative values, and the narrative drives that it sets up, allows the personal and the general, memory and the present, to coalesce. Within this, the body is often inferred as an absent presence, referenced as either a subject of consumer excess or of a displaced sense of ‘wrong place, wrong time’.
Richard Ducker 2009
Richard Ducker’s sculpture continues to surprise the viewer and defy categorization; his ideas and objects are influenced by diverse sources and paradigms that he brings together with a characteristic bravura. The sculptural objects he makes are at times both somber and mischievous, often imbued with a sassy knowingness. Straying deliberately into various genres such as the sexually charged fetish object or metaphorically overloaded ‘memento mori’, we encounter a rich conflation of image and object that uses and abuses our notions of taste and cliché and turns them upside down. Success in Ducker’s work lies in use of process and skilful manipulation of these diverse physical elements that add up to a kind of dyslexic personal poetry and grabs us by the collar with both humor and pathos .
Matt Franks, 2008, Artist, Subject Leader in Sculpture, Camberwell College of Art
The use of cement in Richard Ducker’s most recent sculptures emphasises a kind of death, or a modernist monumentality, but the objects it coats and with which it is juxtaposed evoke nostalgia, myths soaked in dreams, and fairy tales gone wrong. If a domestic interior is evoked, it is one in which homely things have sprouted aggressive appendages, grown unexpected textures, or multiplied into viral aggregates, as if to embody the nightmares that commodity fetishes might dream of if they fell asleep. Like Proust’s Madeline dipped in tea, they evoke memories and sensations according to a logic that combines cultural association with phenomenological fantasies of sensual experiences, often clashing within the same piece. Sculptural processes have become the magic instruments of a post-Freudian fairy-tale, in which life and death, pleasure and pain, nourishment and poison have become entangled in an exchange that could lead to deadly battle, intense pleasure, or remain a secret. Emotionally evocative without ever telling a clear story, affecting without being obvious, Ducker’s sculptures seem to be there with the mute theatricality of minimalism, yet to engage with notions of transformation. With simple formal means, they excavate fears, anxieties and desires associated with the most visceral of physical sensations – attraction and repulsion, pleasure and pain, need and self-sufficiency. The work keeps referring back to the body, a missing body we as viewers cannot help but imagine filling-in for with our own, transforming it into the ill-fitting piece of a jigsaw we are trying in vain to complete with our presence.
Patrizia Di Bello, 2008, Professor , School of History of Art, Film and Visual Media, Birkbeck College |
Artists/Organisatons
Data Wall:
AESD: Agency for Economy and Space Development:
Maziar Afrassiabi, Shahin Afrassiabi,
Sam Basu, John Colenbrander,
with thanks to Julian Meinold and
Piers O'Hanlon
NIS: New International School: Matthew Stock
Treignac Projet: Sam Basu,
Elizabeth Murray.
The Real:
Phyllida Barlow, Tom Burr,
Anne Damer, Karin Ruggaber,
Audrey Reynolds, Fergal Stapleton,
Brian Wall, Martin Westwood.
Oysters Ain't:
Karen Ay, Vanya Balogh,
Fiona Banner, Richard Bartle,
David Batchelor, Rob Beckett,
Simon Bill, Hartmut Bohm,
Jake & Dinos Chapman,
Cedric Christie, Steve Claydon,
Clem Crosby, Cullinan+Richards,
Penelope Curtis, Arnaud Desjardin,
Valerie Driscoll, Richard Ducker,
Garth Evans, Urs Fischer,
FREEE ( Dave Beech, Andy Hewitt &
Mel Jordan), John Gibbons,
Tom Gidley, Paul Gildea,
Katherine Gili, Andrea Giulivi,
Stewart Gough, Naum Gabo,
Robin Greenwood, Brian Griffiths,
Zoe Griffiths, Nicola Hicks,
Peter Hide, Flore Nove-Josserand,
Helene Kazan, Michael Kidner,
Philip King, Simon Liddiment,
Ed Lipski, Colin Lowe,
Sarah Lucas, Christina Mackie,
Rebecca Johnson Marshall,
Bruce McLean, Haroon Mirza,
Cathy de Monchaux, Henry Moore,
Zadoc Nava, Paul Neagu,
Lawson Oyekan, Eduardo Paolozzi
, Nicholas Pope, Richard Priestley,
Michael Sandle, Paul Sakoilsky,
Celia Scott, Dallas Seitz,
Meg Shirayama, Jane Simpson,
Anthony Smart, Bob & Roberta Smith,
Richard Smith, Steve Smith,
Sarah Staton, Dan Stevens,
Simon Stringer, Michael Stubbs,
Gavin Turk, Jessica Voorsanger,
Gary Webb, Richard Wentworth,
Keith Wilson, Mark Woods,
Richard Woods, Lars Wolter,
Christian Wulffen.
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LOCATION:
Almond Building,
The Biscuit Factory,
Drummond Road,
Bermondsey,
London
SE16 4DG.
[Map]
NEAREST STATION:
Bermondsey
OPENING HOURS:
26 April - 31 May
Wed - Sun 12 - 6 pm
FREE ADMISSION
CONTACT
Adam Thomas
Tara Cranswick
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