Photo: Michael Bowles

The table is set, the guests have taken their seats and the servants retreated into concealed corners of the opulent dining room having safely bequeathed their laden dishes to the overflow. A hushed chatter can just be heard to resonate amidst the landscape of jauntily perched confections of the latest fashions, veils almost flutter with the breath of stifled laughter and hidden glances. The silverware buzzes a seductive invitation to feast, flashing with a burnished…white.

The party is about to begin, has begun, is ending is….is that an oyster or a coke can? A feather or a lego brick?

Blink

‘Look at the tin can, look at the tin can’, Kathy’s voice crackles down the phone line

And I am looking, I am gazing at a tin can perched unassumingly amidst the cacophony of paraphernalia. I am transfixed by a tin can…. and the spell hasn’t broken. ………..

The Secret Society: A Sculptural Banquet, set within Sir John Soane’s country retreat: Pitzhanger Manor, is Dalwood’s latest and most artistic creation to date, an opulent feast befitting the house where Soane hosted infamous Baroque inspired banquets, to show off his collection of treasures and eccentricities.

Dalwood’s busts have, in a sense, returned home. They testify to three years of honing technique and wrestling with material since their initial conception after a visit to the Soane museum. At the time, Dalwood had no idea that the lives of both the man and her work would become so intertwined. Now the busts stand within the gilded rooms, their white plaster sparkling as brightly as the numerous candelabra.

This cumulative illusion of glamour initially masks what, on closer inspection, turns out to be an assembly of plastic flowers and cigarette packets. As realisation dawns upon us, the gathering becomes not simply a spectacle but, an ironic comment on our definition of value, a celebration of sculpture itself and, the tracing of a highly personal journey that is as much about the artist as the material.

Photo: Michael Bowles

‘I want to make people see with my eyes’, Kathy says.

These are eyes that alight upon some tassels dipped in plaster on her studio shelf and realise the transformative power of art on the everyday. Her next move was to dip washing up brushes in the same way and to revel in the joy of how beautiful they become: ‘Like a Dada, ready made is beautiful’.

There certainly are Modernist overtones amongst the junk and Kathy admits that although an instinctual artist, the moment you start a creative discourse involving recycling, you can’t escape the conceptual context.

It is also testimony to the influences on her figurative work of her background in interior design and architecture. These elements make up an enviable portfolio of large-scale public art commissions and collaborations with commercial design heavy weights such as Habitat and Liberty. Lines range from planters to tiles and mirrors, all with a distinctly modernist twist.

Public Art Commission: Cyon Valley Hospital, South Wales

‘I studied swags of material for the public friezes and that got me interested in how bodies conveyed clothes…I loved the fluidity of the silk and how clothes have been depicted in sculpture over time… how artists like Rodin made lace look like it could move in a breeze. I started researching the material draping on statues from medieval times to the present day, I even looked at tombs’.

At work is her sculptor’s obsession with transformation and, in particular, the transformation of material. Like her planter designs, which led to an inclusion in the show ‘RIBA: Hardcore- Concrete’s Rise to Luxury’, she initially started casting vintage original figurines in concrete. She loved the elevation of a seemingly base material, making concrete as collectable as the figurines.

‘That’s why I make my sculptures in monochrome, it focuses the viewer on the form and the material’

Concrete Chattanooga Girl

It is this transformation that she refers to as the ‘anti-luxe glamour’ evident at the banquet in the ethereal beauty that plaster bequeaths to pound shop flowers. Likewise, Kathy is not one for the limelight herself and would far rather be in her studio creating- she loves the process of making and the unpredictable nature of her mediums.

‘When you’re casting with concrete, it oozes out the side of the mould, I reference the methods of industrial casting, such as is used in civil engineering, that exposes the fabrication of the piece’.

Again the obsession with the act of transformation is apparent and this is also evident in the banquet. Look closely and you can see the seam lines of the moulds used to create the casts which, draws attention to a distinctively hand-wrought feel to the otherwise life like characters. One may question why then she uses actual objects dipped in plaster for the laying of the feast:

“Firstly it would have taken far too long to cast all of those objects’

Kathy laughs

‘It would have been a lifetime’s work but, also, the objects actually turn out more blurry than the sculptures since the layers of plaster distort the original form. The silicone casts that I use for the busts picks up absolutely every tiny detail- I’d love it if I could get Rodin to come back and sculpt one of my paper ruffs from life’

There is an element of hyperrealism at work then that heightens the surreal quality of the gathering. The intent appears to be to seduce us with the life like quality of the work but to then draw attention to the fact that it is sculpture and a created entity, bearing the mark of the artist.

“I aimed for several things with the banquet: Firstly that it would look like a banquet, like the pictures I have on my studio wall, if you’re going to make something I think it has to earn its right to exist- it’s got to look good.

Secondly that it would be architecturally interesting- I think that quote from Broncusi that ‘Architecture is inhabited sculpture' summarises the links between the style and design of the installation and its conceptual principles.

There’s a great book called ‘Architecture without architects’- I enjoy finding beauty in buildings and spaces that weren’t necessarily built to look artistically stunning, it’s the same with the objects I’ve chosen, the shapes and forms that folded paper can create are incredible; likewise a tin can is a self-contained piece of design that has a beauty to it that deserves recognition.’

For Kathy then, the opportunity to work in such a space as the Manor was, in a sense, a point of departure- the beginning of architecture rather than simply a response to it:

‘The place was just made to showcase the busts’.

The fact that she worked with an interiors stylist rather than a curator to install the show and is keen to move it to new settings is for precisely this reason- to investigate the new narratives between sculpture and ‘space’ as a general concept.

Looking back to her earlier work, it possesses a totemic quality, despite its domesticated scale. She explains how this is due to her interest in how a building can dominate a landscape and yet also be a self-contained environment. It is this that she endeavours to harness in her work and why her design portfolio can just as equally be seen as sculpture: ‘If you scale down something you can suddenly see it in its totality and appreciate it as a piece of sculpture I love the interaction between the three dimensional and the landscape’

Likewise, the ostensibly ordinary objects of the banquet have absorbed the opulence of their surroundings through the casting process, so that they become what Kathy refers to as the ‘Oh My God’ factor. The Lego bricks that adorn the banquet’s guests have become something conceptually uplifting, just as the concrete used to cast her design work became a thing of beauty.

This relates to her third aim for the banquet:

‘I wanted it to be a sculptural piece…I want to shout at people to go and look again at the statues in their local parks. Sculpture hasn’t been given the recognition it deserves in recent times, with many sculpture departments getting smaller and smaller in universities, I want people to recognise it as an art form again’.

It is sentiments such as these that echo in the work as not only a Modernist conceit but as testimony to the fact that this seemingly static work is a very physical, active journey between artist and material. I am reminded of the words of the American architect Louis Kahn:

‘’If you think of Brick, you say to Brick, ‘What do you want, Brick?’ And Brick says to you, ‘I like an Arch.’ And if you say to Brick, ‘Look, arches are expensive, and I can use a concrete lintel over you. What do you think of that, Brick?’ Brick says, ‘I like an Arch.’And it’s important, you see, that you honor the material that you use. [..] You can only do it if you honor the brick and glorify the brick instead of shortchanging it.’’ Louis Kahn. Transcribed from the 2003 documentary ‘My Architect: A Son’s Journey by Nathaniel Kahn’. Master class at Penn, 1971.1

In terms of Dalwood’s work this has been an ongoing conversation that started with her childhood escapes to the library to read books on architecture when she was meant to be in the ballet class round the corner, through to her struggles with sculpting from life in clay and failing to capture the verisimilitude that casting opened up to her.

Photo: Michael Bowles

The busts follow this progress, beginning with comparatively simpler designs to the complex fighter plane, perched atop the head of the final guest. It is perhaps this that lends the installation a slightly nostalgic aura, a personal lament for the craftsmanship of the Baroque in a world that has changed its values, favouring mass production over true style.

Kathy rediscovers this beauty in the world she is surrounded by, injecting some of that glamour into everyday objects as a reflection of their form rather than their commercial worth.

Does this perhaps relate to how she feels as an artist herself, struggling to learn the skills required to pull off her vision and, producing the ultimate luxury product for a world that she is an outsider to?

‘I hadn’t thought of it like that but I suppose it does, there is a certain sadness to the assembly- they are both like us and not like us, looking past each other as if only half there, they inhabit a looking glass world’

Concrete Marie-Antoinette height 26cm

As with her concrete figurines, the emphasis is therefore not on the body itself- the faces of the guests are noticeably hidden or distorted- rather they act as a vehicle by which their fashionable adornments can be seen as appendages to the body with an ability to transform. One of her influences was in fact the book ‘Extreme beauty: the body transformed’ which highlights how fashion and additions to the body can manipulate our perceptions of what we consider to be beautiful. In Kathy’s case the focus is upon how sculpture has this power to transform.

Likewise, fashion is employed for its form rather than cultural significance since, she is captivated by the ‘zany madness’ of fashion and abstract structures that hark back to the forms of her modernist design work. She would love to collaborate further with fashion designers, she says, perhaps juxtaposing her busts with mannequins to further draw attention to the sculptural qualities inherent in the culture we are surrounded by everyday.

We finish our conversation with an amusing anecdote about a recent fashion dinner for which her busts formed the centrepiece:

‘All of these fashion moguls and models were trying to walk off with them after the event’, she exclaims, ‘the organiser had to stand guard and explain that they were art and not some kind of goody bag’.

It seems a fitting point to end on for an artist whose work, at first glance, could be mistaken for the ‘luxe’ that she finds so abhorrent. Rather we discover that it is not the society which she depicts that is real, but rather the art and the sculpting process that depicts it which makes life worth living. Truth is sought through a glamorized hyperbole, just as her concrete planters take the sublime and bring it down to a level of aesthetic appreciation and utility.

Upon discovering that we’ve fallen down the rabbit hole, that we have been tricked, we in fact find reality. There Kathy waits, weaving champagne out of carrot tops, and invites us to feast.

To see Kathy’s portfolio, including her design and styling work see here.