Solo Exhibition - In Parallel: sculpture and drawing

The body of work that constituted the core of the exhibitions was made between January 2006 and April 2007. The concept of the repair or the mend is central and is further developed through the use of recycled clay and the use of elements of earlier sculptures reconstructed within this work. It draws on two strands of enquiry:

1) The reinterpretation of the detail of sail repairs in Gerritt Pompe’s ‘Shipping off a Dutch Harbour’, discussed in Dr Geoff Quilley’s essay in ‘In Parallel: Sculpture and Drawing’;

2) The repair of bed linen found in a house in Umbria, referred to in Mel Gooding’s ‘texts’ in the catalogue of the extended ‘In Parallel’ exhibition at the gallery at Wimbledon College of Art.

During the exhibition in Amsterdam an Agendas/KUNST10DAAGSE event took place in the gallery, debating the work and the research questions addressed; the sound-recording was accessioned by the British Library. This aspect was further developed in the Wimbledon show through a ‘listening post’ installation presenting the sound recordings of the Amsterdam event and the interview with William Furlong, ‘Audioarts’, which forms a central text in the publication that accompanied these exhibitions. These recordings sit alongside the recently completed Artists Lives recording with Bugg (July 2007), part of the Life Stories collection at the British Library.

The later showing of this work at the gallery at WCA provided a broader context across the period of the 25-year partnership of the artist with the Amsterdam gallery and provided the opportunity to exhibit three new works, one developing an earlier theme of the tactile mark evolved from the greater emphasis on drawing within this exhibition and the other two providing the culmination of the research based on reworking and recycling.

Bugg's creativity expresses itself in an indirect dialogue between his paper-based drawings and his three-dimensional pieces for wall and floor. Beneath their apparent quietude, his installations present an underlying challenge to the conventions of the gallery space itself, activating areas which are normally mute and unregarded, suggesting connections and relationships which shift the viewer's understanding of the voids and solids which populate the room.

The elements which make up Bugg's work speak with dislocated voices. The circular wall components are baked in a ceramicist's oven rather than constructed from materials more usually found in a sculptor's studio; their slim forms are no thicker than a canvas on a stretcher, yet the eye reads them as three dimensional; each is a unique entity positioned in its own field, yet Bugg deploys them to deliver unity. He mixes languages - the hollows of the small-scale thinly-walled vessels which he places in sudden groups echo with references quite different from those of the glazed discus shapes which float somewhere between flight and fixity across his walls and floors. He plays games with weight, with texture, with abstraction and geometry, and - by inference - with invisibility as well as the visible, suggesting coherence within a framework that denies overt order. Just as each component carries its own delicately achieved surface variation, so the whole is finely controlled to embrace disruption and stillness, rhythm and break, primitivism and sophistication, energy and latency.

• http://www.wimbledon.arts.ac.uk/35280.ht...