This is the first in a series of curated displays of selected artworks from across the Axis website. Decorative-Ornament features sculpture, painting, glass-work and installation works by Simeon Nelson, Ian Gonczarow, Patricia MacKinnon-Day, Gill Hobson, Rebecca Stevenson, Ruth Claxton, Muray Hillary and Emma-Leone Palmer.
A subtext to a number of artists' dealings with the decorative is the Austrian modern architect Adolf Loos' essay 'Ornament and Crime', written in 1908 at the height of the Art Nouveau movement. Loos proclaimed ornament as 'degenerate' where the 'urge to decorate' should be resisted. The selection here brings together an eclectic group of artworks which by various means and contexts use or reference the decorative or the ornamental - from self-contained geometrical, pixel-like structures to playful, baroque detail and lush painterly sprawls - referencing Minimalism, political symbolism, Dutch flower painting, primitive tattoo designs, Japanese art and graffiti.
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Simeon Nelson
Ornamatrix, 2005 |
| Simeon Nelson Geometrical patterns and fragments sifted from natural and cultural ecosystems are the motifs on which Simeon Nelson's sculptural and digital works are built, in a series of works concerning how nature is mediated by technology. Pixels or corpuscles, indivisible particles of information or matter, are combined with other particles into crystalline matrixes suggestive of organic growth. Influenced by post-minimalism, particularly the writings of Robert Smithson, works such as 'Ornamatrix' (2005) rework the Minimalist grid in a highly ornamental way, in a critique of the banality of purist (male) abstraction.  More on Simeon Nelson |
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Ian Gonczarow
ERA 3 National Socialism, 2006 |
| Ian Gonczarow Motifs, signifiers and symbolism employed by political and religious movements populate Ian Gonczarow's large-scale paintings. Focusing on the stylistic relationships between the prevailing architectural, graphic, design and art of a particular regime, Gonczarow draws attention to the powerful influence that is inert in the accumulated history of the star, eagle or cross. 'Era 3 National Socialism' is one of a series of seven paintings in oil on canvas, using stencilling and impasto. Painted in monochrome, an obscured pixel-like pattern of the Nazi swastika is revealed on close viewing, or when the shallow relief of the surface catches the light. More on Ian Gonczarow |
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Patricia Mackinnon-Day
Kissed The Dust (chalk dust) detail, 2001 |
| Patricia MacKinnon-Day Patricia MacKinnon-Day approaches her working process like an archaeologist or forensic scientist, cataloguing the detritus of what has been left behind - what space, time, texture or colour remains. Commonplace patterns are captured which may go unregistered; items are deconstructed into their tangible characteristics and the associations they have taken on. Verisimilitude is at play in 'Kissed the Dust' (2001): what appears to be the cast of a shadow of a lace curtain is a template, imprinted upon the floor of a disused warehouse with chalk dust. More on Patricia MacKinnon-Day |
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Gill Hobson
Lilac Spiral Detail, 2005 | | Gill Hobson Childhood memories of finding fragments of glass washed up onto the beach inform Gill Hobson's intricate jewel-like forms. An interaction of complex decorative pattern and form, often alluding to primitive symbolism, they combine the delicate beauty of kiln-fired hand-blown glass with the strength of stainless steel in a synergy of techniques and materials. The endless cycle of life, death and rebirth is explored, a fluid process that is echoed in the production of the object's raw materials: objects are blown straight from the furnace then smashed, reshaped and selected for the creation of a new piece. More on Gill Hobson |
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Rebecca Stevenson
Beautiful one, 2005 |
| Rebecca Stevenson Rebecca Stevenson's sculptures are intended to attract and repel. She presents the corrupted object as a baroque spectacle, both beautiful and grotesque, drawing upon decorative expressions such as anatomical drawing and Dutch flower painting. Intrigued by the impulse to decorate, Stevenson views decoration as a fetishistic act, an acting out of desire that supplants the object's original meaning. Her recent series is derived from skulls: obsessive forms of decoration, such as the drilling of hundreds of holes or the modelling of mushroomy growths, mimic natural processes of decay, resulting in an absurd synthesis of form. More on Rebecca Stevenson |
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Ruth Claxton
I thought I was the audience and then I looked at you, 2003 |
| Ruth Claxton Cheap decorative ornaments and figurines are blindfolded, beheaded, mutilated in an ever-evolving repertoire of objects in the installation 'I thought I was the audience and then I looked at you'. Sited on the floor, or placed on mirrored occasional tables, each period-dressed figurine is transformed into a lurid, glam-rock style by the addition of sequins, glitter, feathers and sea shells, resulting in a garish excess of decorative detail. Through sculpture and installation Claxton questions the shift towards an increasingly dislocated, individualistic society, where these lovingly appropriated figurines are isolated in the stiflingly beautiful worlds of their own. More on Ruth Claxton |
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Moray Hillary
generator, 2005 |
| Moray Hillary Edinburgh-based artist Moray Hillary's practice seek to disrupt the established borders of painting, using modular systems of repetition and bodily and biomorphic imagery as a point of departure. His sculptural installations resemble painterly forms spontaneously released from the confines of the canvas into three-dimensional space, in a configuration of decorative forms based on details of tattoo designs and traditional patterns, with both high and low art origins. More on Moray Hillary |
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Emma-Leone Palmer
Painting 1, 2005 |
| Emma-Leone Palmer Decorative patterns of random marks, blown into a Rorschach-like sprawl are akin to the subconscious doodles recording daydreams and reverie in the artist's sketchbook. Appropriating motifs from Celtic patterns, Art Nouveau, Japanese art, tattoos and graffiti, Emma-Leone Palmer's paintings are in a continual state of flux - she revolves the canvas working vertically and horizontally to view the marks in a new light, layering, concealing and cutting through the canvas to reveal the space behind. More on Emma-Leone Palmer |
