SURFACING

by Lizzie Lloyd

Dean Knight’s sculptures and painted forms call for bodily intimacy. Their deliciously soft edges, determined smoothness and languid curves induce a quickening of the senses. Perhaps it’s my own pandemic-induced sensory deprivation talking – it’s hard not to feel nostalgic for touch right now – but I suspect it’s something more. His recent ceramic sculptures are dinner plate-sized dioramas made of parts that are vaguely biomorphic and geometric, and set upon chunky slabs. Other more explicitly figurative forms feature too, like cigarette butts, some tiny Greek urns, and an array of single shoes. These simple arrangements, formed of clusters of four or five parts held in the balance, have an enigmatic quality to them. This is, in part, due to their sidestepping of explicit narrative. But even more significant is the way that the dioramas enact an amassing of surface textures that are varied, tactile, and highly seductive. They warrant stroking, I’m sure of it.

The truth is, Knight’s work performs itself in its very surface. The making of a recent body of work, for example, is revealing. In this new series, paintings in faded hues on unstretched canvas combine with found objects and clay objects that come together to form a kind of relief. In one, Taverna (2020), Knight uses classical motifs such as vessels and a bunch of grapes, as well as a fragment of copper piping (presumably a nod to advancements in Roman sewage systems) set on a Mediterranean wash of horizontal bands in a spectrum of blues. In another, Rustic Window (Delphi) (2020), distressed terracotta ragging forms the background for a boarded up window. The window is made of garish pink hunks of clay, indented with cartoony wood-effect grain, and is topped with a crudely approximated painting of a classical pediment. Knight grasps for high and low cultural references concurrently: Classical Antiquity is seen through the bubbly aesthetic of an unworldly teen, while plasticine blocks butt up against DIY painting techniques and home plumbing. None of this is overthought. In fact he makes a point of avoiding rigorous research in favour of a hasty internet search or a vague recollection, a further performance of surface encounters.

This is precisely the point. Knight is drawn to the idea of his cultural references, and their implied associations, rather than the specificity of the references themselves. He is actively interested in superficial uses of materials, motifs and processes in order to challenge hierarchies that distinguish impression from substance, shallowness from rigour. As a result Knight’s vessels are empty; his wood looks like plasticine; and he happily makes use of silly puns (It’s Not Me, It’s Shoe). In a similar vein, the backgrounds of his paintings are executed in a deliberately weathered rustic style to provoke low-brow associations with the unrefined, the unprofessional, or the inauthentic. It recalls Sontag again, and her definition of the essence of camp as pivoting on ‘its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration’. Camp, is stereotypically associated with a surface level engagement, in thrall to the cosmetic, and a preoccupation with external appearance, above all in gay men. Sontag goes on to describe camp as a ‘badge of identity’. But this implies that it can be removed or replaced, that it is an external signal rather than an intrinsic quality. Instead, we might turn to Judith Butler’s groundbreaking analysis of gender which is worth quoting at length: