One to One: review of Twelve Thousand by Nicola Ellis and Richard Dean Hughes

Pavel Büchler

In her art school days, sculptures used to grow in Nicola Ellis’ hands at an alarming pace, filling up her allotted space in the MA studios at Manchester School of Art like the expanding foam she was using then. It seemed as if the work was trying to escape the intentions of its maker and had to be energetically reined back, put in its place, or to one side, if only provisionally, so that the working may continue. And so it still seems now.

Spread out on the floor of a large industrial unit in a former tram shed in Ardwick (the title of the exhibition, ‘Twelve Thousand’, gives an idea of the square footage, I suspect) are off-cuts sourced from the manufacturer of affordable granite and marble worktops in the unit opposite. Mostly square, varied in thickness, colour and size, they are arranged into two areas of improvised paving whose irregular edges make them look like a work in progress, interrupted rather than finished, with several precarious stacks of surplus slabs still waiting their turn. A lump of a different material, bronze, steel, terracotta, plaster, rests on the top of each of them. For now.

To call a sculpture a lump of material may sound uncharitable. It certainly fails to convey how intriguing but hard to categorise they are (“Something that Franz West could have made”, my friend Nina observes). They too seem unfinished and somehow incidental. Some could be the casts of casting molds, cracked open or yet to be encased in their shells, another still has the sprues attached and stands on them like a piece of toy furniture on its legs while some others turn out to be odd pieces of steel that Nicola used as primitive tools. These, I am told, had been salvaged from the studio of Anthony Caro and were put to use to shape the softer materials or dipped in enamel paint to imprint repetitive patterns on five large aluminium sheets suspended from the rafters in the space.

Where Nicola plays with the reality of materials, readily accepting their pre-fabricated qualities and features as industrial waste or the intelligible traces left on their surfaces by time, the elements or the processes of fabrication, there Richard Dean Hughes plays with illusion. His works are lookalikes or decoys. Made with an astonishing technical facility and meticulous precision, they mimic real things and mundane situations that, however, could never be quite encountered in ‘real’ life, nor do they quite insist on being taken at their face value.

A section of the frontage of a Georgian townhouse with a recessed entrance floats above the floor, a few inches in front of the warehouse wall. The pattern of the false stonework echoes the real bricked-up doorway diagonally across the space but only to show that its improbably smooth surface and uniformly dull finish don’t belong here. It is obviously a stage set, a mise en scène for a theatrical entry suggested by a painting – hanging seemingly from the door knocker – of a hand knocking to attract attention. But in the absence of action my attention drifts to the three simulated stone steps worn by age and then, on the middle step, to a negative impression of a key as if the step was made of soft clay. The imaginary lost key may be the absent protagonist in a familiar enough scenario or it may be a metaphor for meaning itself, an invitation to unlock the message of the fibreboard facade which is plainly open to recognition and yet unacceptable to experience.

It rhymes with the scene of a small accident some distance away, a broken glass of ‘milk’ that seems to have fallen on the floor (or, perhaps, may have been kicked over by a guest at the exhibition opening - except that milk is an unlikely ingredient of such occasions). The glass shattered but its content is only about to spill out. It never will. Its refusal to do what I expect demands that I consent to the make-believe lest I spoil the clever sleight of hand. To understand the conjurer’s trick is never the point; the point is to marvel at the deception, to unsee what I see.

Nicola and Richard are and are not of a kind. They are and are not the opposites of one another. What they share – fearless ambition as makers and, above all, a playful speculative curiosity – is also what separates their distinct practices. When they combine their efforts, as they have done here, symbolic narratives seep into materials, improvisation becomes a concept, things become shadows or ghosts, ends become means. And as with the scale of their installations and sculptures, the ratio of similarity to difference is always 1:1.