Unhorsed
Fremantle Arts Centre
27 October-2 December 2007

Equine high jinks creates fascination and terror of heroic proportions in Susan Flavell's latest solo exhibition. ANDREW NICHOLLS investigates.

After a decade focussed on a single obsession - the relationship between humans and animals - recent years have seen Western Australian sculptor Susan Flavell turn her attention to the human form, in particular, the male nude. Unhorsed is Flavell's first solo exhibition since making this shift, and is the outcome of a sustained period of grant-funded studio time. Showing at the appropriately neo-gothic Fremantle Arts Centre, the show comprises a gathering of 12 larger-than-life male nudes surrounding the exhibition centrepiece, a giant female horse - Flavell's 'Night-mare' - who dominates her male counterparts with a wild and ambiguous presence. The exhibition is the culmination of several years of experimentation into uncommon materials and the evocation of specific emotional affects. 

Since 2001 Flavell has been refining the sculptural application of common cardboard to create large-scale sculptural works. The technique has given birth to some of her most haunting creations, including her Locust-man (a three-metre long locust with a human head - aAR issue 4) in 2002 and her very popular two-metre tall Rat in 2004 (with a staring human face able to be glimpsed inside its head). The technique has numerous pragmatic benefits, utilising only cheap and largely recycled materials (boxes, a Stanley blade and a hot glue gun) yet resulting in lightweight works that are deceptively sturdy. The process additionally allows greater freedom than more traditional sculptural mediums (if an appendage ends up too large or too small, she simply cuts it off and starts again). Indeed, Flavell prefers to describe it in terms of three-dimensional drawing; mistakes can be "erased" or incorporated into the whole, cobweb-like traces of dried glue left in place to draw attention to the working process. Unhorsed is Flavell's first exhibition comprising solely of cardboard works, and has allowed her to push the technique to a scale not previously realised.

The works additionally extend Flavell's major conceptual concern, the attempt to evoke what the artist calls a "presence" - an intangible sense of life in her inanimate sculptural forms. In Unhorsed this is particularly aided by the incorporation of prosthetic glass eyes that give her obviously constructed male nudes an uncannily realistic stare. As such the exhibition works provide a complex and playful critique of heroic sculpture. Materially they speak of the uncanny (rendering commonplace cardboard alien) and the disenfranchised (by recycling discarded packaging), while their intensely realistic gaze allows a sense of melancholy and vulnerability belying their grand scale. This is a watershed body of works for an artist who has made a unique contribution to Western Australian sculpture. 

[Image details: Susan Flavell, Unhorsed (detail), 2007, cardboard, hot glue and prosthetic eyes. Courtesy the artist.]