Steven Gregory

Description

From an artist of many persuasions here is yet another take on what sculpture can be. Steven Gregory surprises us again with his wit and ingenuity. Me and My Friends is a pictorial assemblage in three dimensions, the main player in the acrobatic troupe being the artist himself. Individual people, creatures and other beings, some realistic, most fantastical, are fashioned from bronze sheet. Their features and other characteristics are engraved. The drawing is deliberately clumsy, child-like, causing us to wonder if this may be a distant memory, a dream or perhaps an interpretation of a contemporary get-together, a jolly party.

The sculpture calls to mind the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch (active during the late fifteenth century) who depicted, in minute detail, demons and creatures in compositions such as Paradise, Earth and Hell and Garden of Terrestrial Delights. Gregory uses the vocabulary of complex incident to capture the moment of his assembly escaping the invisible confines of a rectangular box without walls. Looking closely we can find a dog, a lion, a figure with a pointed hat, a fish, a flamingo and more, individually characterised and indicating that if not after Bosch, they may well have come out to play from the quicksilver of Alice's Looking Glass.

An earlier sculpture of Steven Gregory's, The Two of Us 1999, also depicted a dancing pair. These however were fully rounded, three-dimensional forms. The contrast with this fragile assemblage is distinctly marked. Here the flat figures are steadied on earth and grow from the same folds of bronze which make the base of the sculpture. Of bronze, patinated like rusted steel, they rise in homogeneous glee - a flock of birds taking wing.