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Sally Fawkes worked as studio assistant to Colin Reid from 1999–2001, a period including the installation of Bamboo Scroll (1999) at the Shanghai Public Library, and is represented here by both her personal work and by collaborative pieces designed and made with her partner, Richard Jackson. Her work contrasts the interior substance of the object with surface qualities that in diverse ways reflect, refract or obscure articulation with their surrounding spatial environment. This is certainly the case with three works in Fawkes’ Eternal Exchange series, numbers VI (2018), IX (2019) and XI (2019), to the degree that they are configured in cast, cold-worked, engraved, mirrored and painted glass. It is also true Converging Connections II (2018), in cast glass and jesmonite, which derives from a residency at Musverre in Sars-Poteries (France) that resulted in a major exhibition–installation in 2018.
Fawkes shares with Reid an intense regard for the incidental details and textures of the natural and human worlds, their structures and their histories, and her work both embodies and transforms the significance of such incidents in glass combined with other materials. In Vice-versa (2018), the installation–exhibition arising from her Musverre experience, material co-ordinates for the artist’s imaginative inquiry into the spatial, social and cultural parameters of a particular place are configured and transformed in careful and telling detail. Converging Connections II (2018), showing here in Liuli China Museum, is a strong example of this. Here the decorative end-bosses of iron tie-bars that Fawkes observed bracing the walls of houses together (technically speaking, moulded ornamental iron washers with central nut fastenings) are transformed into a sculptural artefact in glass and jesmonite, variously evoke the town of Sars-Poteries’ industrial past, its former manufacturing prosperity and the enduring significance of decorative detail in people’s lives. Aesthetics holding house and community together.
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