MENU
ME WANT NOW
Highly pertinent to my work, seeing a commercial gallery take on a eco-friendly stance was a nice surprise. It makes me happy that is making it's way to a spotlight. The issue is how do we measure the effect of the message onto the audience, without thinking about the fact that the artist and gallerists are making money out of the world's destruction? Will I ever see myself in this position?
​
This exhibition, in my view, was about excess and the consequences of this manmade excess onto ecosystems. Each animal represents in itself variety, encompassing the whole of the animal kingdom at a glance. In the form of a parade towards the Polar Bear, a symbol of purity that is being currently soiled (both by over-publicization and actual threat of existence), is a symbolic reverence which we all should take advice from.
Having spoken with the gallery assistant, I ascertained that Barford wants to express the idea of waiting for the unknown, queuing as a human trait, but I feel the animals are more on a journey in togetherness: they look ahead onto the pathway, but equally they also look back to see if the other ones are following: the foal seems to have heard a noise from the distance, perhaps it should warn the barn.
​
The word drawings have a really distinct energy from the sculptures. They are intimately connected though, because the 'fur' pieces, have the word drawings imprinted as their pattern, leaving the Polar Bear as the only one in plain white, with no pattern. Barford printed all the words on the ceramic pieces so that all the animals represent all the words: they are literally wearing the weight of these words: glory, hope, mine, power, choice, fortune, utopia, more, growth, change, left, time and triumph, and for that matter not attributing a specific quality to a specific animal.
I think that the deconstructed constructed words on the animals and prints, form an ecosystem in ways. Nature is of a fractalian nature, and what is small on the 'fur" pieces, becomes big on the prints. To a certain extent, on a visual level, Barford embodies the idea of eco-system by connecting the words, the sculptures and scale. I find this multi-media relationship interesting and easy to understand.
Like the trophy head sculptures directly illustrate, is at the expense of these animals that our modern society has been building the obsession that the Futurist movement in Italy brought from Art and life. Acceleration, speed and cult of the machine were the values of the Futurist manifesto. In his word drawings, I see the fury of Futurism, but I am happy to see its detournement, as this aesthetic and political power is being conceptually used against itself. Now the question that remains answering is if the context in which this exhibition is delivered grants its genuine nature or perpetuates the desensitisation of the public?