Exhibiting between Saturday 31st January and Sunday 15th March 2009 @ Spike Island, Bristol

If you enter the depths of Spike Island’s Gallery 1 this month, you’ll find an intergalactic experiment that rivals the model makers behind Doctor Who in space age kitsch. This exhibition-cum-science project is the work of Birmingham based artist Ruth Claxton, whose playful sculptures combine interlocking circular frames with alien versions of the china knick-knacks more commonly found on your granny’s mantelpiece.

Industrial steel hoops are welded in intertwining clusters, forming freestanding individual pieces that combine to create one giant sculpture. Some such rings are filled with candy-hued plates and the odd mirror meaning that fragmented views of the monument’s every angle, snatches of colour, china trinkets and your trainers are reflected back into the work. Not only have these mini space-stations colonised the floor but the fluid rings also issue organically from the gallery’s heights in fungi-like growths. Viewers are persuaded to peer into Spike Island’s lofty crevices as never before, only to find a mutilated porcelain budgie staring back.

Following a growing trend for audience participation in modern sculpture, Claxton compels observers to become part of her work whilst they weave through her carefully crafted landscape. As you peer further into the mirrors, the lands end – the apostrophe absent to suggest that the word no longer signifies a geographical location – is more difficult to distinguish. In infinite reflections one sculpture blurs into the next, the wall into the ceiling, one kitsch creature into another until you realise that, like the universe, there is no ‘end’, just an ever expanding horizon.

Despite its futuristic structures, Lands End is not without domestic humour. Claxton has perched porcelain tat – each mutated by a different adornment – on many of the sculpture’s galactic surfaces. Crustaceous glitter balls cover a china cockatiel, party whistles protrude from a deer’s eye sockets whilst human figures seep all manner of growths made from streamers, buttons, beads, bangles, ribbons, elastic bands and even talcum powder pots. It is difficult to decide whether each protrusion is part of the figure, like a beautifully sparkling tumour, or whether an alien host has wormed its way into the figure to transform Nan’s favourite into a Martian hybrid. By each time masking the eyes and face, Claxton has cleverly made these figures both beautiful and grotesque, vulnerable and Machiavellian.

It’s a thought-provoking exhibition that despite straddling the kitsch-tacky border, never teeters into vacuousness. The viewer is left to wonder whether the ceramics are unable to communicate their oppressed misery or whether they are quietly scheming a global takeover. Watch your back whilst you decide, they’re probably moving.

www.ruthclaxton.com

Laura Snoad