The use of cement in Richard Ducker’s most recent sculptures emphasises a kind of death, or a modernist monumentality, but the objects it coats and with which it is juxtaposed evoke nostalgia, myths soaked in dreams, and fairy tales gone wrong. If a domestic interior is evoked, it is one in which homely things have sprouted aggressive appendages, grown unexpected textures, or multiplied into viral aggregates, as if to embody the nightmares that commodity fetishes might dream of if they fell asleep. Like Proust’s Madeline dipped in tea, they evoke memories and sensations according to a logic that combines cultural association with phenomenological fantasies of sensual experiences, often clashing within the same piece.
Emotionally evocative without ever telling a clear story,
affecting without being obvious, Ducker’s sculptures seem to be there with the mute theatricality of minimalism, yet to engage with notions of transformation. With simple formal means, they excavate fears, anxieties and desires associated with the most visceral of physical sensations – attraction and repulsion, pleasure and pain, need and self-sufficiency. The work keeps referring back to the body, a missing body we as viewers cannot help but imagine filling-in for with our own, transforming it into the ill-fitting piece of a jigsaw we are trying in vain to complete with our presence.
Patrizia Di Bello- Professor, School of History of Art, Film and Visual Media, Birkbeck College London 2008
Education
Reading University, B.A. Fine Art
Goldsmiths College, University of London, M.A. Fine Art
Selected one person exhibitions
2010 Oblong Gallery, London, ‘Null and Void’
2008 Gone Tomorrow, London, ‘Words Fail Me’
1998 Cable Street Gallery, London, ‘Store’
Selected group exhibitions since 2000
2009 Standpoint Gallery, London, ‘Cooler Warmer’
2009 James Taylor Gallery, ‘Dumbwaiter’
2009 V22, ‘The Sculpture Show’
2008 Bearspace Gallery, London, ‘Wastestate’
2008 Katherine E Nash Gallery, Minnesota, USA, ‘Enchanted’
2008 Fieldgate Gallery, London, Matt Franks, Sheena Macrae, Richard Ducker
2007 Gone Tomorrow Gallery, London, ‘Dirty Turkey’
2007 Fieldgate Gallery, London, ‘Intervention’
2006 Studio 1.1, London, ‘Grotto’
2006 Fieldgate Gallery, London, ‘Houses in Motion’
2005 Flowers Central, London, ‘Small is Beautiful’
2005 Cell Project Space, London, ‘Hard Labour’
2002 The Yard Gallery, Nottingham, ‘Growth & Form’
2001 The Kitchen, New York, ‘Art for Plot’
2000 Royal Academy, Edinburgh, SSA 2000
2000 Mappin Gallery, Sheffield, ‘New Art 2000’
