Fergal Stapleton

‘Look through the ‘front’ of one container (their positioning vis-à-vis the gallery walls determines the frontal viewpoint), and what looms out is a fairly sizeable, low-slung, whitish, static hemisphere and, slowly spinning on a turntable, what looks like a miniature meteorite. Of course, that last metaphor owes its existence to context: the darkness, the solar red light, the slow rotation and the ersatz half-moon nearby activate atavistic memories for anyone whose childhood occurred after the space race migrated into popular culture. This, if you like, is a diorama of some unfamiliar orbital system: a fragmented orrery, slipped from an unknown museum.

Except that, of course, it is nothing of the sort. The meteorite – or meteoroid, if in our imaginations it has already crashed – is in actuality a pebbled chunk of drilled-up bedrock, gussied up by moody ambience, which the artist assumedly chanced upon in the semi-industrial area of East London where his studio is located. The motionless hemisphere, like many of the semispherical forms in other works, is cast concrete.

Cognitive science uses the term apophenia to describe the tendency to divine patterns and significances in random or meaningless data; Stapleton’s vitrines might be said to enact apophenia in reverse. The more we look, the more the blunt materiality of the cases’ innards is revealed, the more interpretations confess themselves to be pathetic and easily broachable bulwarks. That hunk of bedrock, dredged from the earthy dark, keeps rolling implacably around in slow, bathetic, mock-Wagnerian fashion, a parody of epistemology teaching us nothing new each time. These are not model solar systems. They are not abstract strip clubs, raw flesh rotating under a red light. They are, if you like, sedulously dumb rehearsals of the transformative power of art, its staginess and our self-protecting connivance.’

— Martin Herbert

Carl Freedman Gallery is pleased to present Fergal Stapleton’s third solo show at the gallery. Stapleton will present five new sculptures consisting of the most mundane of objects arranged in deep black Perspex vitrines. Incorporating dull red electric lighting and motorised elements, these tragi-comic creations are perversely beautiful and mesmeric in their effect. (Martin Herbert’s text above is an extract from his essay ‘Apophenia in Reverse’, written for the forthcoming catalogue ‘Fergal Stapleton: And a Door Opened’, published by Carl Freedman Gallery.)

Fergal Stapleton studied at Middlesex Polytechnic and graduated from the MA Programme at Goldsmiths College, London in 1993. He lives and works in London.