A collection of ‘valuable and delightful things’
A trove intimates hidden treasure, things lovingly hoarded, buried, and sometimes found.
Carol Sinclair’s work certainly smacks of the ‘found’, consisting as it does of materials such as pebbles, driftwood, metal wire, stone and glass (pounded and rounded by ocean waves). She collects these on foraging missions around the country and assembles and manipulates them by stacking, filling, layering and encircling ovals, cubes, squares and semi-hemispheres.
The niche alcove she has formed for herself in Williams Art is neatly filled with quiet, labelled forms and gives the still, peaceful and pleasingly emotionless atmosphere of a natural science museum. Her work has a quiet resonance that encourages stillness and also touching… the temptation to feel the contrast of warm, rough wood, smooth, cool stone and sharp metal, and of course the also museum-like feeling that you ought not to!
In that vein Sinclair’s ‘Strata’(a trio of wall-hung squares of wood embedded with a strip of greening copper, rounded green glass pebbles, and flat stones alternately) reminds one of textbook geography images of sedimentary rock, or biology ones of epithelial tissue. In Sinclair’s work we have the calm dispassion of the diagram sans the explanatory comments.
Some forms are hollowed out (like the wood-turned or stone-hewn vessels ‘Coomb’ and ‘Nant’) and then filled with pebble cores or layers. ‘Naiad’, a giant brown wood ’seed pod’ form sprouts a layer of green wire tentacles exploring the air like a sea-anemone, and is a typical example of Sinclair’s meshing the natural and the geometric, the organic and the man-made. The result in this case is almost humorous.
Some work, such as ‘Ovoid Trove’, is more suggestive of man-made objects. Its egg-shaped wooden form is encircled with a copper-coloured band in which various different coloured ‘gem pebbles’ make it seem like something from the crown jewels of an ancient bronze-age king. Many of Sinclair’s works have this hint of the kind of sacred object we might dig up with Viking treasures or ancient graves. Others, like her beautiful ‘vessels’, could fit well into a Zen Garden, though one or two tend to the more bland (or should we say ‘commercially obvious’) kind of simple minimalist object you’d pick up at a home lifestyle store. And why not?
‘Cliff’, one of Sinclair’s frequent collections of stacked (and glued) stones, subtly shades pebbles from dark to light colours and is reminiscent of stone collections found on shelves at Cambridge’s Kettle’s Yard. The only thing detracting from the natural feel of her work is her use of glue as a construction tool to order her stones. Her work would perhaps be enhanced by the use of found rope or string to tie and weave elements together, or perhaps even a clay in which to embed her stones. Maybe even exploring balancing stones (like mountain cairns) would be a natural departure for the already stacked elements.
The dictionary describes a trove as a collection of valuable and delightful things, and indeed Sinclair’s objects work better as a collection than as individual pieces, something that may encourage you to buy several so that you can bring the sense of peacefulness and preciousness they evoke together into your own home. Now if only they could overcome the other layers, piles and troves that already exist in mine.
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I’ve just finished the first day of setting up Twelve, a beautiful and extremely thought-provoking exhibition created from scratch by two of CAM’s most honoured members – Deanna Tyson and John Lyons. I say ‘finished’ when what I really mean is that I am trying to catch up with all the other jobs I set out to do earlier until I became mesmerised by the aforementioned artists’ outpourings.
