All  images copyright Alison Rylands

Alison Rylands

Statement 2017

Balancing Babels. The manifestation of a fixation with cairns, stacks and recycling. Listing towers such as 'Hermes', provide multi coloured or monotone markers for disposable consumerism, referencing the Olympian God of transitions and boundaries who, according to mythology, was the origin of the first Greek cairn. 

A series of sculptures on the theme; A Duty Of Care, reflect on the transience of potency and the inevitable apotheosis of physical frailty.  Casts of the ubiquitous hospital sample bottle are stacked  in pyramidal pyres, assuming the air of defiant deities- Monuments to past vitality and prescient vulnerability. These embossed, intimately masculine moulds seem transfigured in their solid state, rendered gender fluid by the mutability of their making.

Soul Mates - White canvas reliefs, incorporating plaster bandages, reference images of Iron-Age man preserved in peat bogs for 2,000 years. Palely echoing the tanned, rustily burnished bodies of Bog People from Northern European wetlands, such as Tollund Man. Mutely frozen in thrall to medieval torture and trauma, the secret sleepers so dramatically unearthed in all their crumpled, pitted perfection. These subterranean survivors  have been transcribed to form layers of mummified  textile remains. Providing a blank beginning, with the potential to be spoiled by the intervention and touch of others. Adding an archaeological afterlife to their tactile surface.  

Vital Signs is a pigmented diary of Rorscach monotypes on coloured paper, with each image presenting a mirrored transcription of a moment in mind. Suspended on bulldog clips to waft and wave like laundered semaphore or Tibetan prayer flags,  these momentary molten documents softly clink and sway on their nails like sailboat rigging in haunting percussion.