Diana Vives

Artist Catalogue

Group Catalogue Site

Nobody, Nowhere                  

Paul Auster, the American author, once wrote that ‘stories happen only to those who are able to tell them’. The first implication is to take note of those often mundane moments as they happen underfoot. The other, to give them a voice. My earliest trawling for narratives was the collecting of family histories, chance encounters and speculations on the secret lives of objects. These daydreams and animistic fabulations of childhood bridged the gaps of reason in a mercurial world, and in a way, the works presented here are also just that: telling stories to ask questions about things that are beyond comprehension.

These sculptures were made in an extraordinary year in which attentiveness to found materials and the meditative gestures of craft were a way to think slowly and intuitively, mark time, and hold on to something real.

The works negotiate with gravity, suggesting rhythms of imbalance, displacement or emergence as they address precarious individual and social relations – not just human follies, but ‘the state of things’, or unquestioningly adopted beliefs and behaviours in relation to nature, land and human intervention that hung thick in the air of 2020. A capitalist democracy gives individuals a vote, a voice and behavioural choices. Art may respond as part of the commons and on in its own terms, notwithstanding the cost and the environmental chain of consequences in producing much of it.

I think of materials as keys to locks I didn’t know existed, doors on which feelings and thoughts towards the world begin to scratch, behind which lie rooms crammed with idle knowledge and references. Salvaged wood, stone, cast bronze, forged steel and fired clay, beeswax, plant fibre, rammed earth, animal hide and found objects introduce the pre-industrial age as a coordinate within the work and acknowledge the past as an active aspect of the present. They invite such questions as why we give value to certain objects while discarding others, how we decide what is important, who is useful, and how those distinctions shape us individually and socially.

The Japanese Mono-ha ‘School of Things’ and their Italian counterpart, the Arte Povera movement, are strong influences as pioneers of Environmental and Land art who introduced a critique of industrialisation through base materials to the history of sculpture. Other notable inspirations in sculpture include Martin Puryear for his commitment to craft and his pancultural approach to heritage, equally prized in the works of Isamu Noguchi and Dhan Vo, as well as Louise Bourgeois, Richard Serra, David Smith, Anselm Kiefer, Anthony Caro, Theaster Gates, Willem Boshoff and Alicja Kwade.

Standing on the shoulders of giants, my intention is not to convey any sense of knowing or fantasy of resolution, but to reflect the perspectives of others and to adopt a productive relationship to my own internal tumult through a formalisation of meaning that sits somewhere between a question and a proposal.