Kitchen - Clare Goddard and Jo Lawrence

8 May - 23 June 2003

Clare Goddard and Jo Lawrence both use found objects  related to the rituals of cooking, eating and drinking to produce wall pieces and three dimensional artworks. Their work is linked by aspects such as chance, the everyday and the familiar. They deconstruct the familiar in order to install new meaning, enabling the viewer to approach each piece with new eyes.

Clare Goddard

' every tool carries with it the spirit by which it has been created ' Werner Karl Heisenberg, The Art Of Looking Sideways.

Kitchen utensils from around the globe bearing the marks, stains and imperfections of everyday use are manipulated, together with handcrafted implements produced in paper, wood and thread.

These tools are integral to the essence and ingredient of cooking as an artform.

Jo Lawrence

"From the familiar environment of the kitchen, everyday utensils are assembled in new juxtapositions to form a series of semi-articulated puppet fgures. Outside of their usual function ordinary objects are invested with new life. Photographic elements are combined with objects from flattened sieves to steamers, spoons and reconstituted chairs.

The photographic faces of the figures instil a sense of identity and presence and an implied personal history. My involuntary fascination with puppetry is expressed by Svankmajer's (film maker) description of the puppet 'as a human object, which straddles the line between the recogniseable human form and accompanying behaviour and the inanimate world of the object.'

Objects are found at car boot sales, junk shops, or sometimes just seen in the street, then they are treated, rusted, re-arranged, jointed and assembled. Materials include metal, wood, fabric, plastics and more recently, knitting. Theatre, puppetry, film, Alexander Calder's circus, odd machinery and icons are among the many influences which have somehow got into the mix  and inspired me.

Probably inevitably, I am now also working with animated film. The still objects and figures now actually do have a life of their own, moving and inhabiting an imagined world." Some of Jo's figures have been inspired by celebrity TV chefs