Women Make Sculpture

Almuth Tebbenhoff

PANGOLIN LONDON
all photos ©Pangolin

You might have noticed that I probably write more about Female Artists than many other Art medias, it has not been intentional, they are ROCKING the Art scene more and more. Still there are needs for Galleries to put an extra large W up for Women sometimes. Women continue to earn a lot less than men and unfortunately are not as well represented in Museums and Galleries.

Pangolin Gallery is showing a small but strong show by some of the best Female Sculpture Artists out there:

Christie Brown

Lost & Found

Bronze, ceramic and gold leaf

Christy Brown is a professor of Cheramics at the University of Westminister, where she focuses on re-examination of the discipline through history and new approaches, to presentation such as installation and intervention.

Rose Gibbs

Mountain

Bronze

This is Rose Gibbs graduation piece from when she graduated at the Royal College of Art (2010). Quite a kick in the gut piece. Here you can see the sperm giver, also represented as the root, the tree... while the woman is shown struggling through the faces of the pregnancy. I felt connected to this piece especially since I am considering a third child. It will mean quite a lot of limitations (time, career...) and extreme bodily changes, but then again also joy!. Should I, or should I not?

The gallerist and I did share a little laugh at the piece as well, as I could not hold back from saying. "She sure must have had a hard pregnancy....".

She also did intend to give the piece a comical effect:

"satirical sculptures poking fun at gender stereotypes. Bronze is used to celebrate and commemorate historical events, I have used these associations to comic affect. The mountain is a metaphor for the epic, populated by women in various states of pregnancy, vomitting, pissing and lactating in absurd quantities my art plays on the notion that women are tied to their biological functions. The landscape in which these women find themselves is male, tree trunks have become penises, symbols of virility, but defunct, limp in this instance. The knob ends are polished, a play on words and a reference to revered religious icons, rubbed smoothed by years of people touching them for a blessing.

            -Rose Gibbs

Ellis O'Connell

Meniscus

Bronze

Ellis O'Connell is an Irish Artist working often with discarded agricultural tools and dairy vessels. Her work and shapes reminds me of England's Queen of sculpture Barbara Hepworth.

Charlotte Mayer

Guardian

Bronze

 Charlotte Mayers work made me think of a combination of music and nature, like fields with old fences.

Sarah Lucas

Hard Nud

concrete

Sarah Lucas makes the P.J. Harvey's "Let England Shake" album that I am listening to right now, feel "Right on Target".
She did shake the world with Tracey Emin in the 90's, as part of the YBA (Young British Artists), they even started a store together, but ended it with burning the content, the ashes you can find at Emin's show at the Hayward Gallery. If you do look around London you will see that she has made her marks. From having her photos at the Tate Britain to being part of the British art show earlier this year at the Hayward Gallery, and I am sure she has a lot more to shake out at us in the future. This week work of hers will be at the Aldeburgh festival and next week a solo show at the Dunedin art Museum in New Zealand is opening.

Polly Morgan

Communion

Taxidermy, glass, silver and enamel

Polly Morgan is a young taxidermist born in 1980 and lives in London. There are a lot of  well deserved buzz going on about her right now.

Her intention has never been to mimic the natural habits of animals, as they are traditionally displayed, but to place them in less expected scenery. The scale and settings are often unnatural, but the animals are never anthropomorphised. Seeing them out of place encourages us to look at them as if for the first time; a rat sheds its association with horror and disease and can be rightly viewed as a beautiful animal.

 From Polly Morgan's website.

Abigail Fallis

Dummy Mummy

Bronze

“ I am an artist whose major interest is in what is happening around me, specifically issues that affect us all...and how they in turn affect one another. I find the surrealist visionaries such as Max Ernst inspiring; he was desperately concerned about the growing divide between man and civilisation, but more than anything the loss of nature...I use whatever comes to hand from my surroundings and try to make sense through my own work. I’m a maker, and it’s through this process that a sculptural language develops.”
Abigail Fallis

Abigail Fallis

With strings attached

I use my sculpture as a thinking tool

Abigail Fallis

With this pulsating heart leading its arteries to the planets, I will shake a little and say have a great weekend before I leave for my own heart beating universe.

With Love

Kristin