Andrew Lord

Andrew Lord first gained attention in the late 1970s for ceramic vessels that looked like they had been plucked from Cubist still lifes. While he has since moved on to other thematic pursuits, the uncannily rendered household or decorative clay object remains his most common and compelling subject. This exhibition surveys the past two decades of Lord’s work, presenting five series that comprise nearly thirty sculptures on pedestals and one video. For Breathing, biting, swallowing, tasting, smelling, listening, watching, 1994–2000, Lord molded vase-, cup-, and pitcherlike vessels with the parts of his own body that correlate to the title’s actions (ears, mouth, neck, eyelids), leaving behind a rough, lumpy terrain pocked with visible finger and teeth marks. Glazed to a remarkably glossy white crackle with small streaks of gold leaf, these viscerally performative impressions are here paired with two wall-mounted rectangles of plaster and beeswax, titled between my hands and inside my mouth, both 2010, for which the artist’s hands and mouth molded inverse cavities that protrude eerily from the calm white surface.

Such corporeally based interactions conjure Janine Antoni or even Ana Mendieta, but the body as mold or tool is only one aspect of Lord’s focus. Memories and the landscape of his birthplace, Whitworth, in Lancashire, England, are the subject of two other works. For Spodden at Healey Dell, Whitworth, 2009–10, the movement of a local river, shown churning opaquely around rocks in an accompanying video, inspired seven chalky finger-raked sculptures depicting water currents and made from burlap, plaster, and beeswax. In these attempts to conjure and record the mutable—moving water, memory, or an active, aging body—Lord proves his consistent mastery of imbuing rough-hewn forms with ardent human resonance.