Lauren Gault at Temple Bar Gallery + Studios
Barking ravens, wolf-howling people, speech-mimicking passerines: Lauren Gault’s “Galalith” comes with a backing observe of unreliable animal sounds. The squawks and cries are impersonations and unusual combos: beast- and birdcalls, human and nonhuman voices, variously merged. This fitful creature-chorus is an apt accompaniment to the hybrid types of Glasgow-based Gault’s mercurial sculptures. From a distance, every of the three essential (and untitled) works right here appears a completely totally different aesthetic species. One, suspended from the ceiling, is a self-contained, figurative presence: a white, carved-foam portrayal of a wolf grappling with a easy sphere. (Accompanying notes determine him as Fenrir, a monstrous being from Viking delusion, “devouring the solar on the finish of the world.”) One other composition is extra summary: a triptych of sturdy, head-height, pale grey and purple cuboids. The third, unfold out on the ground, is an unfixed assemblage of ornamental and utilitarian oddments—items of blown glass, scraps of baler twine, a 3-D printed photo voltaic panel—swaddled by rumpled lengths of grey marle cloth.
Dissimilar as these sculptures are, they’re certain up by recurring particulars and thematic threads centered on agricultural and archaeological topics. The lupine cryptid reappears, for example, on a tiny scale among the many gadgets clustered on the ground. A choice of small, thick capsules—mineral boluses utilized in cattle farming—turn into, right here and there, curious sculptural adornments. Key among the many connections, although, are dispersed, fragmentary samples of shiny “galalith”: a manufactured materials, resembling plastic however created from milk protein (the phrase means, from historic Greek, “milk-stone”). As such, melding animal and mineral, pure substance and industrial course of, it registers as a great ingredient in Gault’s densely packed artwork of entangled combination and daunting multiplicity.
— Declan Lengthy
