Trickster Figures

I edited this catalogue for an exhibition I curated at MK Gallery in 2023: Trickster Figures: Sculpture and the Body. It includes documentation of the exhibition alongside an experimental text by writer Francis Whorrall-Campbell, and an essay by myself. Graphic design by Mark El-khatib.

Trickster Figures brings together eleven contemporary artists whose work stretches the definition of sculpture. The exhibition includes play, touch, sound and movement as well as objects that are made to be worn. Crab shells, tree roots and shopping bags sit alongside a dance floor and a water fountain. Elements will change and grow while some will never be finished.

The exhibition is rooted in the idea that new relations to the world are under construction, involving powerful slippages between binary systems, identities, humans, animals and the environment. Bodies are implicated in this new relationship, rendering them vulnerable but also magically available for new inscriptions and ways of thinking. As the exhibition curator Jes Fernie describes, “There is a leakage, a seepage in these works. Many of them allude to bodies or systems that relate to bodies. Jealous bodies, broken bodies, fossilised bodies, vulnerable, contaminated bodies. There is also love, tenderness, glamour, and compulsion.”

The twentieth century saw British sculpture celebrated across the world, with artists from Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth to Richard Deacon and Rachel Whiteread experimenting with materials, forms of construction, and display mechanisms. Key exhibitions presented radical new developments in the field of sculpture, capturing generational interests as well as catastrophic events and moments of collective trauma. Trickster Figures extends this exhibition history by working with a broad range of practitioners to reflect on our own ‘age of anxiety’ drawing on current themes relating to vulnerability, contagion and the climate crisis.

“The historical or mythological ‘trickster’ is often defined as a character who disobeys the rules and defies categories and conventions. The academic and philosopher Donna Haraway refers to tricksters as ‘wild cards that reconfigure possible worlds’. I see the artists in this exhibition doing just that.”
Jes Fernie

Order from MK Gallery