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Indepth Arts News:
"Bill Woodrow: The Beekeeper"
2001-05-23 until 2001-07-15
Mappin Art Gallery
Sheffield, ,
UK United Kingdom
Bill Woodrow is one of the worlds foremost sculptors. He has exhibited his work
throughout the world for the past twenty five years and has recently mounted a new
sculpture Regardless of History on the empty plinth in Trafalgar Square. Woodrows
sculpture features in many major museum collections. In 1996 he exhibited at the Tate
Gallery, now Tate Britain, in a major one person show. Since the early stages of his
career, when he made sculpture by modifying domestic objects and transforming them
into other things, Woodrow has been concerned with the poetic metamorphosis of
objects within a narrative. His imaginative juxtaposition of images and objects has
established him as an artist who employs potent narrative within the medium of
sculpture.
This exhibition The Beekeeper consists of a body of work made around the theme of
the beekeeper, a mysterious figure in the form of a puppet. The centre piece of the
exhibition will be a seven metre long sculpture, Shadow of the Beekeeper, an
assemblage in which a giant puppet mutates into the three dimensional shadow of a
huge bee. The puppet figure re-emerges throughout the exhibition as part of a series of
sculptures that surround the Shadow of the Beekeeper and which present a narrative
about a worker whose labour entraps him in a cloying surreal world.
Together, the other beekeeper sculptures create a setting in which the puppet
beekeeper grapples with a variety of surreally connected objects, where honey and wax
combine with other substances in an environment that is both weird and tragic as the
hapless beekeeper tries to work through the bizarre variety of objects and situations in
which he finds himself. The realm of the beekeeper includes smaller painted sculptures
of pupae and swarms that combine with the larger works to create a complete
installation. The Beekeeper represents an interesting development of Woodrows
practice as a sculptor, allowing his poetic sensibility full reign.
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