Tom
Woolner

One of the first considerations about these objects is that it’s not immediately discernible how they came into being. They seem part drawn and painted, and part hewn or cast. The forms are created using lines and colours that are both applied by Woolner but also exploited, using the inherent characteristics of the folds and pigments of the silicones, foams and resins that created them.

It means that while some of these objects flirt with a classical perception of art and craftsmanship – they’re hung on the wall like drawings or paintings in ornamental frames – they equally look like they could have been mined from the vestiges of some buried civilisation; hung like relics formed in the sediments of some whimsical land.

Combinations of silicone, foam, acrylic resin – these are materials that pour and ooze into voids or expand into their own voluptuous forms. Woolner has squeezed and pushed the materials, but hasn’t forced them. They return that favour by settling into candied undulations, and take on the sheen and speckle of their own light-industrial chemistry. Each of the works, in their own way, makes it apparent that they have taken final form in their own moment.

It gives us a wonderful feeling that whatever narrative we may derive, it resides as much in the natural calcifications of these unnatural materials, as it does in Woolner’s imagination. The effect, strangely, is that any discernible story feels all the more authentic.

That sentiment becomes even more tantalising when you study the depictions. They appear to be illustrating and safeguarding what could be folklores or absurd teachings: the images often read with diagrammatic logic – anatomical studies, organ systems, intestinal maps or meteorological illustrations – but are set within a narrative frame of bucolic calmness, like a fable: there’s a wooden hut with a puffing chimney, a quaint rowing boat bobbing on the sea, and storybook cloud formations. At times they feel like fossilised friezes excavated from the cavities of a Brothers Grimm tale.

Woolner has described some of these works as drawings or even just pictures, which resonates with the idea of study or information. One of Woolner’s techniques is to draw with acrylic resin and pigment onto Perspex, which once dry is removed to reveal a baby-smooth surface of chalky pastel tones. These works in particular take on the delicate beauty of meticulously extracted frescos, with brittle edges and chiselled backs.

However, for all the classical characteristics and educated readings they tempt, they don’t resolve in any true enlightened sense. The works can be mischievous; in some of them Woolner has drawn back onto the surfaces to delineate forms, and those depictions have the charm of light-hearted caricatures. Even the most squeamish of us would struggle to be repulsed by what appears to be a dissected heart and lungs. A plank inserted into what seems to be a heap of intestines, like a wafer in an ice cream. Two giant fleshy feet emerging from the clouds, like the descent of a clumsy god. If there’s wisdom in here it’s more joyfully surreal, as if Robert Crumb and Matt Groening have played a game of Exquisite Corpse.

It’s worth noting that Woolner also creates performances. He’s developed plays, musical sketches, characters and costumes his whole career, performing in galleries as well as backrooms of London pubs. One of his most revisited is a troupe of Arcimboldo characters. It’s inspired by Giuseppe Arcimboldo, the Italian 16^th-century painter famed for portraying people’s heads as clusters of fruits and vegetables… and who, incidentally, died with kidney stones. Woolner colourfully joins those dots and floats the question, could it be possible that Arcimboldo triggered his own demise… by filling his face with too much rich food?

Objects and historical cues inspire stories that become performances for Woolner, and while the Arcimboldo troupe develop with their own idiosyncratic logic, the visual props that set the story in motion are always serenaded and celebrated throughout. Without doubt there’s something in this approach that invites comparison with how Woolner handles his wall-hung works: the whimsical cloud floating across a landscape always pays homage to its origins as a blob of silicone.

The props that Woolner creates are too unrefined and the performances too improvised to diligently recite a narrative, but they’re also too invested and unmistakeable to be insincere. Throughout the Arcimboldo performances, Woolner treats us and his material to all the dramatic tropes – a spotlight, a drumroll, a symbol crash – but it’s more a pageant to the idea than satire; and it’s the idea that demands the performative absurdity. Of course, it’s an improbable history, but behind it all it’s an even more tempting consideration… and you’re left wondering, is there really any other way to tell that story?

Like the drumroll or the spotlight, Woolner’s wall-hung works use their own tropes; specifically, the pretence of art: they hang on the wall, some have frames, and they all contain images. It’s little wonder that we’re tempted to read them. They feel familiar because the fleshy tones and carnal depictions look like they could relate to our own bodies; the scenes enclosed within them have the charm of the illustrated children’s books we may have once read; they have all the plucky vibrancy of our favourite cartoons, and the assured look of metaphors or morality tales.

But in spite of all of that, what carries my fascination with these objects is the sense that we haven’t quite got the full picture. And, moreover, that nor has Woolner… “They feel like excerpts from a larger story… or they’re just their own story.” There’s that beguiling sense that these kindred objects pre-date us all, like folklore or geology-lite. Whatever sense or non-sense exists in these works, it’s unyieldingly cast within their fabric… and you’re left wondering, again, if these objects could have told it any other way.