Open now until 8th June, South Parade is pleased to present The Cart Before the Horse, James Fuller’s second solo exhibition at the gallery, continuing its long-standing commitment to his sculptural practice.
Through fragile surfaces of copper, beeswax and textiles, Fuller sketches out curious technological visions, by mining the imagery and language of newly published patents.
The first moments as you enter the gallery might present a feeling of emptiness, meaning giving way to gravity and pooling on the floor. A series of Fuller’s ultra-thin electroplated foils offer a cautious welcome. Continuous conductive metal skins — tenths of a millimetre thick that have been slowly grown in tanks of electrolytic solution — take up this vulnerable space communing at your feet.
Extracted moments from the endless jargon within patents, for a “Fatigue Detection Device”, “Autonomous Beehives”, and a “Beet Scalper”, are engraved in the foils, circulating the folded and stitched surfaces, to create a delirium of incidental poetry. The texts are caught like whispers in a colliding glass well, circling a plughole that’s not forthcoming.
The same cannot be said for the soaps in the bathroom, an earlier but ongoing durational work from the artist.
Elsewhere, two large full-colour images on embroidery mesh adhered to fabric mattress wadding stretch out the time between two sequential frames of moving image, confronting the viewer from both sides. Sitting amongst them is a wax vase-like vessel with smooth guts and rough external faces. A single engraved drawing wrapping around its swollen diameter, the cart before the horse.
This talismanic carving depicts a recently published patent (from 2023) for a speculative horse-powered vehicle, where the required clean energy for forward motion is generated by an actual horse on a treadmill behind the driver via gyroscopic generators. Simultaneously replaying the common analogy for doing things the wrong way around or worse, getting ahead of yourself.
Described as talismanic, as it represents the sticky and illusive territory Fuller’s practice likes to inhabit. For several years, the artist has been wading through the ever-evolving data stack of newly filed or renewed patents, through different seasons and states of mind, as if landscapes for painting. Filtering ambitions and speculations for protection — the playful and the absurd — the logical and the surreal. These sensations are anchored into copper, beeswax, and earth minerals — the original subjects long left behind in these cut-up translations, which perhaps start to work against human exceptionalism and highlight the awkward pace of innovation; one finger in the plug socket and another touching earth.
In this other world, everything is momentarily stable, but it can all be over in an instant, crushed like an empty can of soda or deformed by careless placement in the midday sun.
