From Sharne Wolff…
What’s in an egg? For her seventh solo show at Darren Knight Gallery, Michelle Nikou is exhibiting a number of new works including a ‘sculpture’ entitled aeiou, a set of 5 eggs (including one double-yolker). The eggs are cast in bronze and arranged for this show ‘sunny side up’ in a metre long installation. If you look at them long enough, it’s possible to make out the shape of each vowel in the individual eggs.
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Nikou is interested in using unconventional ways to encourage new meaning from ordinary domestic items, playing with their usual relevance or properties or both. The humble egg has a long association with art history – from the egg tempera originally used to fix pigment in paint to its frequent use as a symbol in the surrealist paintings of Salvador Dali. Nikou’s bronze eggs, together with her Free money bronze plates cast with the numbers 5-8-3,0-0-0 and other object pieces in this show like Untitled (basket with neon) are hard to categorise. They perhaps sit somewhere between the surreal and the ‘readymade’.
The exhibition also includes a work comprising wool, cement and wood entitled Ted Hughes scarf. How intriguing – is the grey wool scarf in this work one that belonged to the Ted Hughes, ‘poetic voice of blood and guts’, Mr Sylvia Plath and ‘the biggest seducer in Cambridge’?
Until December 8
Darren Knight Gallery, Waterloo.
Pic: Michelle Nikou aeiou 2012 Bronze edition of 3 with variations. 5 pieces. Approx 100 x 14 x 3.5 cm. Courtesy the artist and Darren Knight Gallery.
