UW84DC 6

In the late 1970s, a generation of British sculptors like Tony Cragg, Anish Kapoor, Bill Woodrow and Richard Deacon reacted against the Minimalism and Conceptualism of North American art, turning instead towards narrative concepts and materials taken from the urban environment, and working on them using new techniques involving fragmentation and physically grappling with the materials. Richard Deacon’s series UW84DC is a suite of sculptures in steamed ash, which he twists into writhing curves that are fixed together with small aluminium plates and screws. The title of the series is text message language for “You Wait For The Sea”, which Deacon explains in terms of an approach to the philosophy of language: “I was thinking in very general terms about how language is the sea that we all swim in. And how into this static language energy of lines and questions, come all these thoughts.” Deacon defined his sculpture from the point of view of interest in perception, and with a formal intention that focused on the process: “I wanted the material and the act of making the work to be its most significant aspects; for them to be taken at the same level as the form, so that the structure and the form would be a result of the process of making the work and of the structure of the actual material.”

Carmen Fernández Aparicio