Tuesday 4 October 2011

117. MISSPENT YOUTH by DANIEL HOGG

ART BY OFFENDERS: secure patients and detainees.

KOESTLER EXHIBITION AT THE ROYAL FESTIVAL HALL (details in previous blog)

This piece of Postmodernism  stops us short and makes us look as if for the first time at the familiar. These monstrous brushes are about two metres long. The stuff of nightmares and legends. Useful in an ogre's castle perhaps, and Heracles might have found them handy when cleaning the Augean stables. Here they are strung up helpless against the wall. And they are carvings of great beauty and workmanship.

There is a note beside them:
'Bracknell Probation Service, Berkshire.
I left school in 1983 at 16 and worked for seven years as an asbestos stripper. I did the equivalent of A Level Art while serving a four year prison sentence. Released in 2010 I started an Art Degree. These sculptures reflect the first job I had and the time that has passed'.

We now know more than we did 25 years ago of the deadly properties of asbestos. If this sculpture reflects the first job the artist had, is it modelled on brushes whose purpose was to sweep deadly particles into the atmosphere? 
All we know is that here is an arresting  sculpture which is a joy to look at.

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