Anna-Wili Highfield 2019

ANNA-WILI HIGHFIELD COMPANIONS

Cover: Anna-Wili Highfield Owl, 2019 ceramic, steel, brass and enamel 80 x 80 x 50 cm

ANNA-WILI HIGHFIELD COMPANIONS 13 November – 7 December 2019 Exhibition Opening Thursday 14 November, 6 – 8 pm

Keeping sculptor Anna-Wili Highfield company in her latest exhibition at Olsen Gallery is a suite of spirit animals, deftly conjured, and with striking immediacy, from the unlikely entwining of wax, brass, wood, white clay, enamel and hand-torn cottonrag paper. Many of the artist’s familiar totems are present - an owl, a robin in flight, a watchful cat - evoked with an economy that is born of close observation, a practiced hand and abundant natural sympathy for her subjects. Some such as ‘Goat’ are proudly disembodied, their wall-mounted heads alluding to the vernacular of the hunting trophy, while others such as ‘Budgerigar’ have been captured mid-flight by a few swift gestures, seeming to strain against formal representation by the artist’s hand.

A precarious balance between figuration and abstraction has characterised Highfield’s sculptural output for the past decade, struck through the sophisticated collaging and assembling of disparate materials. Arrested at the miraculous moment of coming-intobeing, the forms of her spirit animals cohere and coalesce just enough to animate the works, while resisting any overt resolution. Some appear almost sketched in air, such is the skill of Highfield’s puppetry, her ability to extrapolate a restless wing from a torn fragment of painted paper appended to a curved brass rod.

Despite their deliberate unfixedness, Highfield’s animal sculptures possess a vivid and penetrating intensity, conveyed through their life-size scale and distinctive materiality: their luminous eyes and downy wings. In using wire armatures for the delineation of bodily features and brass hardware for eyes, and in the way she builds three-dimensionality through the interlocking of different planes, the sculptor draws on Constructivist materials and techniques, but tempers Constructivism’s harsh geometries through delicate applications of gold leaf and the handmade irregularities of torn cotton-rag paper.

Working consciously against the heroism and solidity that is the conventional language of statues, Highfield’s animal totems are instead invested with a lightness and airiness, a barely-there ethereality. Her exquisite crafting of the animals’ partially-constituted forms demands that the mind’s eye of the viewer completes the depiction. In a new development, Highfield has introduced wax, exploiting its volatile qualities by either dripping it or painting it over the underlying ceramic, paper or brass form, as if to preserve the work in its constant state of becoming. If the handtorn paper and bent brass rods imply the struggle of realising these spirit animals, the wax embalms their resistance to resolution.

The malleability and viscosity of wax is also apt for an artist with post-human leanings. Previous readings of Highfield’s work have understood her zoo of animals as functioning in some sense as proxies for the artist herself. The individual character and mien she is able to invoke through the subtlest of gestures and a very considered melding of materials does indeed suggest a finely-tuned sympathetic identification with her animal subjects; at the same time they sit outside time and place, serving as emissaries to other worlds.

The plainly descriptive titles (‘Goat’, ‘Budgerigars’) the artist has given her animals belie their rather fragile and mercurial existence as sculptures. Untethered from any prevailing narrative, these chimerical avian, feline and capricornian forms belong instead to the realm of the symbolic, the spiritual, or the surreal. Constructed intuitively and vibrating with almost spectral agency, they are especially redolent of 19th-century Symbolism, with its embrace of imaginary and dream states over naturalism and realism. Though Highfield is highly attentive to the various possible cross-cultural and trans-temporal interpretations of these works, she is careful not to labour these associations, preferring instead to let the animals’ more enigmatic qualities resonate.

Presiding over Highfield’s menagerie in this exhibition are the elegant, oblique forms of three Companions, partial ceramic busts of the artist which she understands not as self-portraits, but as spirit houses, surrogate homes in which alternative subjectivities or energies may dwell. Thin brass rods wend their way loosely and gesturally around white ceramic body parts, each Companion anchored by a central, anthropomorphising wooden beam. With its understated classicism, this current body of work departs from previous series of Highfield’s sculptures in which, with their extravagant and spiky gestures and the gleam of highly polished brass, a more baroque aesthetic prevailed. Profoundly pared-back, these three female figures convey not the heroic idealism of the Graces, but a more embodied and human vulnerability, with fragments of an incarnated or materialised self frequently dissolving into abstraction.

The graceful, calligraphic arcs of the Companions’ brass armatures articulate Highfield’s central line of enquiry in this exhibition. At times suggesting fingers or necks with sensuous observation, at other times veering with abandon into abstraction, they express the empathetic and fundamentally fluid entanglement between self and otherness that lies at the heart of Highfield’s work.

Nina Miall November 2019

Robin, 2019 archival cotton rag, cotton thread, wax and brass 50 x 20 x 55 cm

Robin, 2019 bronze, acrylic, wax and brass L: 175 x 20 x 20 cm R: 157 x 20 x 20 cm

Pigeon, 2019 brass, archival cotton rag, pigment and wax 30 x 25 x 40 cm

Falcon, 2019 wax, archival cotton rag, ink, brass and steel rod 195 x 70 x 60 cm

Finch, 2019 archival cotton rag, cotton thread, wax and brass 170 x 14 x 12 cm

Budgerigars, 2019 archival cotton rag, cotton thread, wax and brass 133 x 20 x 20 cm

Swallow, 2019 brass 20 x 20 x 23 cm

Cat, 2019 wax, brass, ceramic 16 x 18 x 35 cm

Goat, 2019 wax, brass, wood 70 x 60 x 40 cm

Companions, 2019 hand built ceramic, brass, rose wood 150 x 180 x 50 cm

ANNA-WILI HIGHFIELD COMPANIONS 13 November – 7 December 2019 Exhibition Opening Thursday 14 November, 6 – 8 pm