David King

Description

During the late 1980s Dave King made a number of sculptures loosely based on the themes to be found in the tale of Bluebeard's Castle. In Terrace, the simple house-shape, made in shorthand - a roof, wall and door is all we need for immediate recognition - is almost banal in its simplicity. It is only when we ask the question, "Why blue?" that associations gather, and the artist's acknowledgement of the Bluebeard tale becomes the vehicle for us to seek other metaphors.

Are these doorways, assembled like so many entrances to everyday terraced houses, similar to those through which Bluebeard's bride passed to discover what lay beyond? Might there be an armoury, a treasury, a room of former lovers, a secret garden, or indeed the well of tears in which, for her curiosity, she became stranded for the rest of time? The key to understanding the sculpture is that houses are invariably, but not exclusively, the anonymous shell to the life within. The concept of container and contained gives us a great opportunity for word play in order to seek further metaphors for Terrace: façade and interior, seen and unseen, conscious and unconscious, assumption and knowledge . . . Gustave Courbet wished to paint the roof-tops of houses in Paris like his seascapes, a thought that fascinated King in his musings around the theme of roof forms - the roof-tops as waves and the possible conjecture about what may lie beneath the sea. In this minimalist scenario there are many avenues to pursue. In Terrace the chimney pots are exaggerated to the point of being phallic. King remembers that as a child his father had a Leica camera in which the lens had to be extended before it was used. For a small boy having his photograph taken, the association was strong and lasting. The idea of extensions and forms of exaggeration are also brought into play in this sculpture.