Studio Project 12: September 2008
Cheryl Field: Phylum & Genus
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Phylum & Genus is the culmination of Cheryl Field’s month-long residency at Market Gallery, utilising new kinetic sculptures that create a complex alchemy of sublime and abject sensory experiences. Field’s work rises from a preoccupation with biology and perception; combining conceptual rigour with a playful, experimental process to produce kinetic installations that both set and confound expectations through the hypnotic poetry of motion. During this residency she has cannibalised the flotsam and jetsam of discarded objects, drawn from charity shops and the street to be subsumed into her deft and humorous work, drawing parallels between the work she creates and the strange transcendent moments observable in the urban space.
Although not intended as scientific experiments, she invokes the vernacular of science to build quasi-narratives that juxtapose the authoritative and absurd, inviting the viewers to triangulate their own position in relation to the multiple, indefinable truths that personal perception invites us to draw from the complexities manifest in the work.