critical reflection

Introduction

In writing this critical reflection, I had thought that it might shape up to be a neat retrospective text that summarised the development of my practice over the last year. Instead, I find that my lines of enquiry have multiplied and are continuing to open up. The end of the MA course has acted as a valuable time for reflection, while the emphasis on ‘making public’ has provided direction to the considerations of my ongoing practice. As such, it was an interesting challenge to try to write a cohesive text that encompasses discussion of past works, ongoing research and nascent ideas. Below I will discuss some of my recent artworks, what inspiration they drew from and what, in turn, they have inspired for future research.

MA Summer Show

In the MA Summer Show I exhibited Lipsum iii, the third in a series of work that explores ideas about the visual language of function, creating hybridised forms that confuse perceptions of use. They are soft, almost embraceable, forms that sit in proximity to mundanity.

Lipsum iii consists of two geometric forms, not quite human in scale, that bulge with softness in parts and reveal a hard flatness in others. Enveloped by a skin of blue towelling, the forms are connected by a base of the same fabric that stretches across the floor between them. The work evolved, in part, from an interest in both referencing and subverting the conventions of formalist sculpture. Namely, incorporating functional elements like zips and pockets - affordances that pierce a certain set of sculptural traditions, as discussed in my Unit 2 Critical Reflection.

During the private view and, later while invigilating the show, I was able to watch people interacting with Lipsum iii. A number of viewers unzipped the zips, stuck hands in pockets, prodded the stuffed body and poked the hard edges. I have written before about the decision not to extend an explicit invitation to interact with these semi-soft sculptures, preferring instead to let their ambiguous forms make that invitation (or not). To physically interact with an artwork in an exhibition setting without explicit permission is a contravention of the norms of the space. Why did some viewers feel able to contravene these norms with my work? My feeling is that the familiarity and accepted functionality (of both the work’s features and its material) allow people to see it as something more akin to furniture in a showroom, which they might freely touch.

Discussing Lipsum iii in our pre-show crit

Private view attendees interacting with Lipsum iii

Lipsum

The title Lipsum, given to a series of four works I have made over the year, is a reference to the relationship between art and the utilitarian, and the hierarchies therein. The word is a contraction of ‘lorem ipsum’ which is itself a truncation of ‘dolorem ipsum’ - ‘pain itself’ in Latin.

Lorem Ipsum is a placeholder text that has been used in design since the mid-century. It was used for its perceived unlikeliness to be confused with the final text that should replace it. At one time it was widely thought to be nonsense text - in fact, not even real Latin. This was debunked in the ’90s when it was revealed to be a section of Cicero’s Socratic dialogue De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum - "On the Ends of Good and Evil" (Cima, 2015).

I was interested in the history of this term and how it linked to my own considerations of a mutability in the perception of function.

The original purpose of the Lorem Ipsum text was to communicate a set of ideas contained within the language. It’s particularly interesting that the text was grappling with some of the most esoteric philosophical concepts of the time, given its eventual designation as faux-Latin babble. In its second life as a dummy text, though, its function was as a placeholder - its original function almost entirely forgotten. While not as widely forgotten these days, its original meaning is, for the most part, just as redundant. Much like Tim Ingold's description of how a metal pan in the hands of a cook is an object but in the hands of a scrap-metal dealer is a material (as discussed in my Unit 2 Critical Reflection), the utility is in the eye of the beholder.

There is a comparable chain of transformation existing within my artworks. The components of Lipsum iii, for example, all had past lives where they served a purpose. The rectangular frame was once a set of desk legs, the cylindrical frame was once the body of a table and the fabric ‘skin’ was sewn from old towels. Together these elements formed a structure that aimed to convey a kind of nonsense function - indicators of usability that were confused by the incongruence of material and form, and the objects’ existence as an artwork in an art space.

The work was disassembled after the Summer Show and its parts (with the exception of the fabric skin, which I will discuss later) are waiting in the wings - neither utilitarian objects nor artworks, though retaining the potential to once again become either.

The liminal space in which artworks exist between exhibition provided the conditions for some of mine to take on an entirely new function. Untitled (2024), Lipsum and Lipsum ii all spent a few weeks in the shared MA Sculpture studio where people would frequently lean on them, sit on them or even use them as a mattress on which to nap. The different relationships to these objects that are activated in different spaces led me to think about their future as artworks. The removal of their stuffing engendered the removal of one kind of usability - which I will discuss further below.

Placing in Space

All of my recently exhibited works have been installed directly on the floor. In starting to develop a new set of works that would be hung, I revisited the question of what I find appealing about floor-based sculpture.

One reason that I identified is the element of ‘encountering’ the work. While floor-based sculpture is hardly novel or surprising to a contemporary viewer, there is still an impact when putting an object in someone’s path. Do we perhaps feel more of a sense of discovery when our path is interrupted by an object at our feet, compared to - for example - navigating around a series of plinths holding works?

Phyllida Barlow, in a 2012 proposal for her Tate Britain commission, explained:

“The sculptural object blocks, interrupts, intervenes, straddles, perches, and above all, occupies the space we might otherwise occupy ourselves.”

In perhaps overly-literal terms, we would not occupy a plinth but we would occupy the floor space in which a sculpture sits.

Years later in an interview with Gilda Williams for the Royal Academy of Arts Podcast, Barlow said of her own propensity for making floor-based work:

“The floor still seems to me to be a sort of anarchic space where things can interrupt and prevent, or open up and close…a wall somehow…it has respectability. Things can behave on walls.”

The monumental size of Barlow’s work disrupts the entire surrounding space. Her floor-based works are often architectural in scale, unable to be viewed from one angle in their entirety yet grounded by their physical accessibility. Viewers could walk across a floor that they shared with the works in order to approach an attempt to understand them.

My sculptures, however, are more akin to furniture in scale and are far less imposing on their surroundings. In terms of the kind of hybridised soft sculptures that I have been creating, there is also possibly a sense of added ambiguity: without a display apparatus, are we certain it ‘belongs’ where it is placed? Tied to this is a certain moveability/unfixed-ness that could amplify any implication of utility.

In attending the recent exhibition Encounters: Giacometti x Mona Hatoum at The Barbican, I was struck by the impact of the many floor-based works. Hatoum approached the exhibition itself as an installation - with “a focus on the motif of the cage, themes of domestic and hostile environments” (Barbican, 2025).

Inside the gallery there was a strong sense of being in a kind of apartment. The L-shaped room has low ceilings and along one edge is a wall of windows that look out onto the Barbican Estate. Throughout, separate works incorporate chairs, rugs, a vitrine of found objects and an anteroom containing a bed and shelving. The viewer moves through the exhibition in the same way they might wander through the furniture in someone’s flat. Encountering a work like Hatoum’s Remains of the Day - burnt wood and mesh shells of chairs that reference military violence - is particularly impactful in this setting.

Encounters: Giacometti x Mona Hatoum, installation view

In Abstract Erotic: Louise Bourgeois, Eva Hesse, Alice Adams - an exhibition at The Courtauld that closed shortly after Encounters opened - a different approach was taken. A kind of faux-floor perimeter had been installed. Coming about a metre away from the edge of the room, it appears to almost hover above the real floor, painted in the same greyish white as the walls to which it joins.

The resulting display apparatus was a hybrid of walls, floor, shelf and plinth. Although I appreciated that it was in part a solution to working with a small gallery space, I actually found the effect was a little alienating as a viewer. Works that felt like they should be viewed in the round seemed like they had been penned into a corner - to borrow Barlow’s term, like they were being forced to behave.

Abstract Erotic: Louise Bourgeois, Eva Hesse, Alice Adams, installation view

On the other hand, this manner of installation did create a satisfying dialogue between the quasi-floor-based pieces and the hanging works on the walls by creating a continuous visual line between. I was particularly drawn to an untitled Eva Hesse sculpture from 1966. Hardened balls of enamel, string, paper and metal that are bound with cord strain heavily at the net bags in which they sit. The bags themselves are pinned to the wall by their string handles that appear to be uncomfortably stretched under the weight. The conflicting elements within - the softness and hardness, stretchiness and tautness, the familiarity of the net bags paired with the strange objects within - exist in perfect tension. The placement of the work does not seem to mirror the ‘well-behaved’ wall-hanging of, for example, a canvas. Instead, to me it speaks of storage - cured meats hung to dry or strange clothes slung on a coat hook.

Eva Hesse (b. 1936)

No title, 1966

Nets, enamel, string, paper, metal, cord

Dimensions unavailable

Skins

In my own practice I have recently been exploring the hanging of work, a deliberate departure from the floor. Barlow, in the aforementioned 2012 proposal, described how suspended sculpture could be “more ambivalent than grounded or plinthed works… as if toying with gravity confuses the identity of what we are looking at”.

This possibility is exactly what I am exploring in an ongoing investigation with the working title Lipsum: Skins. ‘Skins’ refers to the fabric components of the works from the Lipsum series and one untitled precursory work.

The soft sculptures I have been making have their stuffing removed while I am storing them. The stuffing is vacuum-packed, any frames disassembled and the fabric shells folded to be put away. While I knew how transformative the act of stuffing/emptying was, it wasn’t until I had a small collection of the fabric shells that I became interested in them as artworks in their own right. I came to think of them as skins - once again blurring the boundary between material and object, in the same way that we might view an animal hide as a fabric or as an artifact in its own right.

The idea to hang them was an exercise in attempting to mentally reframe them - to in some way release them from their old life as stuffed sculptures. I hung each skin by pinning it to a free-floating shelf that sits in a shallow alcove and photographed them one by one. The simple act of altering the plane in which they were holding weight and space was transformational.

Their silhouettes were now changeable and mouldable, the folds of the fabric and the rounding of straight-cut seams giving them an organic, bodily appearance. I particularly like this in contrast to the bright blue colour of some of the skins - it gives them an almost alien feel.

test shots for development of Lipsum: Skins

The start of the Skins exploration has opened up a series of questions to be investigated:

Do any new ‘skins’ need to have at one time been stuffed to form a different sculpture?

Does our eye try to ‘stuff’ them, in the same way that our brains can (and do) turn 2D nets into 3D forms? Or does that only occur if we know what they looked like in their previous form?

Is there a hierarchy amongst the skins and the stuffed works?

What effect do the ‘functional’ features (zips, pockets, etc) have in this incarnation?

Running parallel (for now) to this research, is a return to ideas about mapping and recreating spaces in miniature using materials that are at one point malleable but harden to become modular pieces with which I can build. I had been working with these ideas at the beginning of the MA but came to focus on the Lipsum series that, while referencing architecture and machinery in some senses, spoke more of furniture and the body.

Body/Machine/Building

Both my own making in the studio and researching the work of other artists has clarified for me two key lines of enquiry that are beginning to, at least for now, diverge. The first is concerned with deconstructing the relationship between softness and solidity, looking at a kind of formlessness that has emerged from the dismantling of older works. The second is concerned with geometric forms, reproducing larger spaces in miniature, structures that hint at possible utility or a sense of containment. Rafal Zajko's sculptural works exemplify my interest in the latter.

Zajko describes how his work embodies “a singular type of speculative fiction that is at once visceral, darkly humorous, and inherently queer”. Most recently during Frieze he installed a series of works reminiscent of sci-fi machines, including an inhabitable retro-futuristic spaceship pod.

Threadbearer (2022), however, is a much more ambiguous form. Its component parts seem to borrow elements from a range of objects: an instrument, a children’s bead maze toy, a sci-fi machine, a rusted archaeological artefact. As a singular object, Threadbearer simultaneously offers the strange, rough-edged intricacies of a blown-up microscopic organism, and the familiar, formal qualities of a shrunken-down architectural structure.

Rafal Zajko (b. 1988)

Threadbearer, 2022

Terracotta, ceramics, thread, latex, copper, bronze, glass, steel, pigmented silicone, wood, plastic, acrylic paint

62 x 21.5 x 16.5 cm

Having been influenced by Olivia Bax, particularly in the development of Lipsum works, I am attracted to Zajko’s work in much the same way. Their work shares a concern with space and place being performed at the scale of childhood play objects. The ambiguity triggers a childlike sense of curiosity, a desire to know them.

I am currently working with some small papier-mache panels (A4 and smaller) and disc/bowls made of paper pulp and plaster. These will be joined to form basic structures that reference both internal and external architectural spaces as well as a kind of nonsense machinery. I was able to revisit some of these ideas around fictionalising and speculative object-making in October, when MA Sculpture students took part in a week-long residency with the Henry Moore Sculpture Garden.

Expanding Practice: Community Workshops

After an initial tour of Henry Moore’s grounds and the artworks within, we were invited to develop a series of workshops that responded to the artist’s work in relation to our own practices, within the broader theme of Encounters. These workshops would be run for the public on-site.

In a one-off workshop, Agency of Objects, MA Sculpture collaborated with artist Olivia Bax to run a session in which participants were introduced to Speculative Realism through a series of creative writing exercises. This workshop was an adapted version of a seminar run by Bax for MA Sculpture during Unit 1. To frame these exercises, we referenced Moore’s penchant for collecting natural forms that would inspire his sculpture. Participants were encouraged to think about how we encounter and recontextualise form by writing speculative biographies for a chosen object and eventually placing them in a fictional world of their creation.

A second workshop, Reinventing Reality, was repeated across the week and hosted by different groups from the MA Sculpture cohort. The event consisted of a series of exercises that aimed to get participants thinking about the way we encounter and reproduce form.

The participants worked in pairs. Person A chose an object from a box containing natural forms (pinecones, animal bones, rocks, etc.) and everyday items (a disposable coffee cup holder, a broom head, etc.). Person B could not see the object and had to, based on their partner’s description, sculpturally recreate it using materials like clay, cardboard, sticks and sheep’s wool. Person A could only describe their object’s form and textural surface. They could not reveal what material it was made from, its colour or (if it had one) the object’s function.

The participants had to extract information about these objects by analysing them in the same way we might analyse an object that was entirely alien to us. We stressed that the results of their labours did not need to look like the source object at all - in fact, it was a more interesting outcome if they didn’t. Ambiguity and strangeness were not problems to be solved; they should be embraced.

The resulting sculptures were varied - some looked like a remarkably accurate reproduction of their source object; some looked like a Henry Moore maquette; some looked like completely unplaceable lumps. Some of my favourite outcomes were reminiscent of miniature Arte Povera works.

Artworks made by participants were added to our library of objects and as such could be used in the same exercise when it was repeated in later sessions, allowing for a chain of conversions. In these cases we were able to see what information had been retained across multiple transformations and what had fallen by the wayside.

Participants sharing their writing in the Agency of Objects workshop

Participants making during the Reinventing Reality workshop

Participants’ artworks from the Reinventing Reality workshop

Both workshops acted as a research opportunity for some of my practice’s key concerns. We explored ideas about the visual language of function and how we respond to this language when we are forced to divorce it from our perception of an object. In running these exercises we were codifying the actions that I try to reproduce in my practice: firstly, breaking down a familiar form into raw visual and tactile data. Secondly, attempting to communicate this information and then using this decontextualised data to fictionalise and speculate.

This residency was valuable not only because I felt that the exercises connected so well with the concerns of my own research, but also because it was reflective of the direction that I would like my professional practice to take. When I consider the act of ‘making public’ within my practice, exhibiting work is only one part of this. In the future, I am hoping to work in more of these publicly engaged roles like the HMSG residency. I am applying for a UAL Community Exchanges programme that offers the opportunity to develop the skills of a creative practitioner in a community-focused environment, as well as providing funding for a series of workshops at the programme's culmination.

My Practice: Looking Forward

Although the MA course is nearly at an end, I am excited to be at the beginning stages of several new pieces of work. The upcoming MA Research Festival and the publication I am making for it feel like an opportunity to take stock of my practice, rather than a finale. My work over the last year has crystalised some enduring areas of interest in my practice: within this, too, I have developed a better understanding of my own ways of working.

In looking to the next steps in my professional practice, I can draw from the range of recent MA experiences that have engaged with some of the many ways that arts practitioners can ‘make public’ their work. I have exhibited work, participated in group shows, given talks, written and facilitated workshops, and have begun to create an artist publication. I feel well equipped to continue to work in all of these ways while also maintaining a making-based practice.

Barbican. (2025). Barbican announces Encounters: Giacometti x Mona Hatoum [Press release]. 3 Aug. Available at: www.barbican.org.uk/sites/default/files/documents/2025-06/Barbican_Encounters_Giacometti%20x%20Mona%20Hatoum_Press%20Release_FINAL.pdf [Accessed 2025].

Barlow, P. (2012). Artist Proposal. [online] Tate. Available at: https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/tate-britain-commission-2014-phyllida-barlow/exhibition-catalogue/proposal [Accessed 2025].

Barlow, P. (2019). Phyllida Barlow in Conversation with Art Critic Gilda Williams. [Podcast] Royal Academy of Arts. 24 Apr. Available at: https://open.spotify.com/episode/367hBM1qvy68p11HEMvsoG?si=7aea3af2b390446c [Accessed 2025].

Cima, R. (2015). The History of Lorem Ipsum. [online] Priceonomics. Available at: https://priceonomics.com/the-history-of-lorem-ipsum/ [Accessed 2025].

Zajko, R. (2025)‘Song to the Siren (Echo)’ by Rafał Zajko at Frieze Focus. [online] Available at: https://www.rafal-zajko.com/frieze/ [Accessed 2025].