Samantha Donnelly's sculptures, drawings, photographs and collages are amalgamations of cast and collaged everyday detritus, both naturally occurring and manufactured. Her investigations usually begin with a process of observation, documentation and the breaking down of the subject(s), which she then rebuilds into an object or image, melding her raw materials into configurations that are sometimes lurid or ridiculous, frequently fragile and precarious constructions.
Often they appropriate historical styles of art and decoration such as Modernism with its concerns of surface, balance and colour, or the Baroque with its dramatic chiaroscuro and elegant use of detail. It is not unusual for both techniques – the extreme reductionism/restraint of the first, the excess ornamentation of the latter – to exist side by side within the same piece.
Donnelly uses these 'two formal characteristics of the overkill and the understated... to create a lyricism, a difference in speed within the work'.1
Her juxtaposition of the hand-made with the mechanically produced, and distinctive use of colour and surface finish, all come together to create a tactility, sometimes apparent fickleness, that is simultaneously inviting yet stubbornly unyielding - but this is all part of the artist's exploration of the structure, perception and experience of space and time.
Paul Stone, 2008
1. Statement by the artist, August 2008
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