Exhibitions

Venue: Longside Gallery, Wakefield

Dates: 19th March–5th June 2005

Notes: touring

SIZE MATTERS

Exploring Scale in the Arts Council Collection.

A new National Touring Exhibition from the Hayward Gallery, South Bank Centre Opens at Longside Gallery, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, 19 March – 5 June 2005

Size Matters examines the power of scale, and its potential to create an alter meaning, in recent British art. Featuring over thirty works from the Arts Council Collection, including sculpture, painting and film, Size Matters offers an insight into a current trend and reveals a prevailing obsession among artists with the relative size of things. The works selected feature recognizable objects that have undergone a process of enlargement or reduction, making the viewer feel gigantic or tiny by turn, prompting reconsideration of form, function and context.

We often use the size of our own bodies to test the relative size of other things, but in Size Matters the scale of the human form cannot be taken for granted. Hermione Wiltshire’s My Touch (1993) comprises ten huge glass fingerprints on the gallery walls, suggesting the presence of a giant. The figure in Richard Patterson’s painting Motocrosser (1995) appears more than life-size but is in fact an enlarged representation of a miniature plastic toy.

Many artists have used scale to transform familiar domestic objects to disorientating effect. Domestic flights of fancy underpin Dwelling (2002), an animation by Hiraki Sawa in which domestic trickery shrinks a fleet of aeroplanes to such a degree that an average house provided sufficient airspace. The everyday air-freshener finds epic proportions in Eric Bainbridge’s In Heliotrope (1990). Standing over two meters tall, this mauve monolith assumes a grotesque character quite apart from its diminutive original.

Art made on a grand scale has tended to steal the limelight in the traditions of western art history, but a number of artists have sought to reverse this situation. Martin Creed proposes a cheeky antidote to the grand tradition of statuary with his Work No. 78 (1993) – a miniature ‘monument’ made from layers of Elastoplast. In Cornelia Parker’s Fleeting Moment (1984), Big Ben souvenirs surround a suspended brass pendulum, offering an alternative perspective on the famous landmark.

Science continues to extend the limits of big and small, and reduction and enlargement enable artists to give visual form to matter of minuscule or immense dimensions. Mark Francis’ large monochrome paintings, Positive (1992) and Untitled (Negative 2) (1992), evoke the world found beneath the microscope. At the other end of the scale, Paul Etienne Lincoln shrinks The World and its Inhabitants (1997) to fit a pack of playing cards, and in Space (1995) Gary Rough constructs the unnerving infinity of the cosmos within the confines of a mantelpiece. Size Matters is accompanied by a fully illustrated publication featuring two new essays on the subject of scale by writer and historian, Marius Kwint, and Natalie Rudd, the curator of the exhibition.