Butler Gallery
6 April – 26 May 2024
In Helen Hughes’s solo exhibition, ‘finding the most forgiving element’, the gallery is filled with sculptures that exude a candy-like impression; smooth, shiny, and sumptuous. Colours pop and materials gloop, droop, and flirt. In one corner, a waist-high sphere resembling a lollipop reveals itself to be a giant balloon covered with translucent orange plastic. Aptly titled Establishing One’s Presence, Objectively (2024) it calls forth the strong desire to touch that pervades the exhibition, explaining the sensory wall just outside the gallery. This wall offers visitors the opportunity to stroke, pinch, and tap the various materials present, providing a generous outlet for those to whom the tactile temptations of the work might otherwise prove overwhelming.
In the gallery, a screen resting against the far wall acts as Rosetta Stone, with the video, SA_FILM_GREEN_REV_ (2024), playfully opening up how the artist wants us to read and understand her work. Shades of pale green and pastel pink dominate through slick transitions and animated movements. Close-ups of silicone expand the medium into porous skin. We see an object inflate, accompanied by the sound of birdsong as the first breath of the morning, and as it deflates, the imagery and sound descend into fuzz. Plastic clouds suck and pack down into asymmetrical shapes, assemblages and structures. The lens carefully moves over the sculptures, creating a kaleidoscopic impression. The soundtrack emanates throughout, not only keeping rhythm with the video, but accompanying the sculptures placed in the gallery – radio static, dispersed with chimes and bells, inhaling sounds, and snippets of soul music.
The sculptures holding form in the gallery are odes to the commodity, the production and marketisation of desire, mass industry and the “fetishistic surfaces of retail.” In all of Hughes’s pieces there is a strong relationship to the body as one imagines how these shapes were physically stretched, draped and poured. She expands her sculptural output to include a flirtatiousness that playfully opens up the desire to touch. The colours and textures speak to the seduction and romance occurring between the artist and her forms, while the shiny, synthetic surfaces bring the viewer back to the material.
In the display, A Hierarchy of Human Beings (2024), five glass-like balloon forms are stacked inside a Perspex plinth. They are light, in both senses of the word, exuding a transparent tenderness; cavities balancing on top of one another. In another arrangement, We Are Now Absorbed in Something (2024), pink goo has been poured onto another sphere, preserving the remains of an action perfectly executed.
Wall hangings akin to breast plates adorn the space, rubber and pigment cast into rough rectangles with very defined contours and protrusions. Colours bleed into each other, making topographic lines upon the surface. One of the objects is draped over a plinth, the material’s form and colour a striking reference to skin. Titled The Wonder That a Thing Exists (2023), it elegantly connects matter to form; the artist’s touch to the artist’s hand.
Getting Outside Her Own Head (2024), is blue plastic, sticky in its viscosity, poured over a plinth, with irregular multicoloured polka dots stuck on top. Demonstrating a panache for titling that is often as playful as the works themselves, it is reminiscent of a headless cloaked person, and the smooth contours and folds appear fixed in motion.
The exploration of texture throughout adds to the depth of this visio-tactile exploration. From the matte hues Hughes uses, to her glossy finishes, this is an aesthetic that serves to draw the viewer into a deeper engagement with the materiality of the works. The interplay between light and shadow, especially in the translucent and reflective surfaces, creates a dynamic visual experience that shifts as one moves through the gallery. This effect is heightened by the careful placement of the pieces, allowing each sculpture to interact with its surroundings and the viewer in unique ways. In the previous century, artists cast a lens on modes of mass production by using them to create art. Hughes tightens the critique, subsuming the aesthetic of the consumable into the production of laborious one-offs.
In ‘finding the most forgiving element’, Hughes employs the materials in her oeuvre to manipulate and awaken desire in her viewer, skilfully weaving together fragile and firm, organised chaos to create a playful material display while also critiquing material culture.
Ella de Búrca is an Irish visual artist and lecturer at SETU Wexford College of Art.
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