Liz Larner @ The Modern Insitute

An ambulance is pulled up outside the Modern Institute and two medics are attending to the fallout of a recent street brawl. Stepping from the pavement into the gallery, the airy white space seems unexpectedly still and expansive. It takes a moment to adjust. 

Liz Larner’s ceramic lozenge-like forms are presented in orderly sequence, and appear to be floating proud of the wall. Viewed at a distance, this has the effect of homogenising the sculptural pieces. Conforming to each other in shape and in size, these objects are partially obscured by the formal language of minimalism; camouflaged by the visual repetition of their display. The gallery space seems cavernous since the works appear self contained and anti-monumental in scale. And here lies the trap for the viewer, who remains unprepared for the rich density of the highly pigmented surfaces that open out on closer inspection of the work.

Cracks, ruptures and fissures fragment their surfaces, sometimes revealing the internal structure of the ceramic material and sometimes revealing a hybrid material that has been pigmented. This process of layering and rupturing enables structure and surface to bleed into each other, destabilising the hierarchical relationship in which the ceramic is a concealed substrate that supports surface pigmentation. Instead, these objects are turning themselves inside out. 

Titles such as subduction, inflexion and mantle allude to geographic formations and geological change through time. Some works include embedded stones or mineral chunks, introducing questions of authenticity, especially when paired with synthetic materials such as epoxy resin. Are we to read these minerals as being unadulterated ‘natural’ materials taken from an external environment and introduced into Larner’s construction process? If so, nature has been shrunk down and fixed firmly within the surrounding mass, undergoing a metonymic collapse of scale.