Sunbather
Mikey Freedom
10 February - 23rd March 2024
Mikey Freedom’s work seeks to find both balance and rhythm in the use of line, colour & shape.
As he dances with these elements he continues to unpack the deepest of personal meaning in the figurative compositions he wrestles with & while at times celebratory, his work contains weighty symbolism that anchors his artistic vision.
Sunbather pulls at the threads of our summer memories & yet, much more, for it calls the viewer for an interpretation that the artist stops short in giving. Swept up like drift
wood upon our human shore, it becomes a hopeful tide of future restful days against the contrast of our times. A world of lazy play, aimless pursuits, summer - a season of bodyscapes through time & place, of nostalgia & about the one that got away.
Artists Statement
Vault comprises 11 wall-based sculptures and one floor piece, all fabricated meticulously from cast glass, steel and acrylic sheet – materials that Cockburn describes as ‘demanding precision’.
All the works in the exhibition are titled Unhurried Study (#1-12), and are presented without dates. They represent 12 years of making, remaking, consideration, refinement and presentation. They are rigorous in their fabrication, and while that pristine, sharp, honed aesthetic is the foundation to these objects, for Butcher that is more a meditative outcome of a much broader probing of art history lineages and a kind of aesthetic lived-reckoning with the world around him.
Alert to how the natural and the artificial worlds sashay in proximity, Butcher finds a moment of simple balance and eloquence in his sculptures. By extension, the viewer finds themself within these works, caught in their surface reflection or positioned at a bodily scale.
This is perhaps most literally played out in Unhurried Study #10, a coffin-like form that stands upended, its reflective black acrylic sheeting drawing the viewer into its chamber and, by doing so, presents a threshold or precipice – a psychological space to step across, and into.
While it is not a new device or consideration for an artist, it makes sense within this suite of works that bridge the aloof, the spiritual and esoteric, with the cold hard precision of geometric abstraction.
Selected works
