Sculpture and Performance by Sally Underwood
Dependent Rational Animals
a collaboration with British painter and writer, Roxy Walsh
The work feels almost devotional, the artists seem to be seeking an interiority and intimacy over the demands and velocity of modern living. It recalls Gaston Bachelard’s famous quote that the home is an environment where one can ‘dream in peace’. Walsh and Underwood’s collaboration can be seen by extension as forming around mutual aspirations, a conversation without fear of reproach. Moreover, ‘Dependent Rational Animals’ is about formalising anecdotes and searching for allies – the exhibition has the feeling of the best type of conversations.
– George Vasey Art Monthly
Sculpture as a Home
I am the object-maker and Roxy is the painter. In the first days of what turned out to be a rich and deep friendship, we talked about what sculpture and painting might do for one another.
Does one fit inside the other, or do they stand side by side even if one literally contains the other? What is the effect of such proximity, have on each of them? Would they be able to maintain their independence?
We thought about hermetic spaces, about shelters (both actual and imagined), and about one work might re-articulate another, and about how sociability between works might allow for a more nuanced articulation of ideas.
The only way to answer these questions was to make exhibitions together, and that was the beginning of Dependent Rational Animals.
By means of these beginnings, these slight differences, and the appeal . . . of my carefully subdued, reserved manner, I shall attract to myself one intimate friend, whom I shall influence deeply.
Bishop, Elizabeth. ‘In Prison’. Collected Prose. Chatto & Windus, 1994: p.190.
Solo Work
MoMA
My art career started when I was 25. I went to MoMA in New York while I was on a business trip and saw that this was what I wanted to do.
I came home to London and set it in motion. Five years later, I went to Chelsea College of Art and Design to study sculpture.
Movement
I loved to make sculptures that did something. It was never anything useful, and whatever they did almost always led to their demise.
In some cases, it happened fast, with a fall and a smash. In others, the movement was subtle, yet relentless.
Performance
Much as I enjoyed static art works in galleries, my own practice didn’t find it so easy to stay still or last the duration of an exhibition.
Live art was a natural development of my interest in sequence, time and living processes.
Madagascar
In 2008, I left London for Madagascar, to work with an NGO, and imaging spending the rest of life there. I stayed much longer than I intended, but in the end, I had to come back – although a part of me never left that wondrous country.
But after more than two decades, London wasn’t for me anymore.
Berlin
I moved to Berlin and lived and worked in a beautiful studio on the Spree River for five years. Then my practice came to an abrupt end.
It was very uncomfortable. But I knew my artist-brain was always years ahead of my conscious mind, so I had to believe it would make sense one day. It took until 2022 to do so.