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Visual Artists' News Sheet | January – February 2021
Career Development
Kevin Francis Gray, Bust of Cáer, 2018, installation view, Museo Stefano Bardini, Florence; image © Kevin Francis Gray, courtesy Pace Gallery and Museo Stefano Bardini
Kevin Francis Gray, Young God Standing, 2020, statuario marble on steel plinth, installation view, Museo Stefano Bardini, Florence; image © Kevin Francis Gray, courtesy Pace Gallery and Museo Stefano Bardini
Challenging Precedents JOHN RAINEY INTERVIEWS LONDON-BASED IRISH SCULPTOR, KEVIN FRANCIS GRAY.
John Rainey: In your latest series, the ‘Breakdown Works’, the stone we know from your previous sculptures interacts with a cast of other material characters, creating conversations between the precious and the industrial, the found and the intentionally sculpted. How were the material elements for this work sourced? Kevin Francis Gray: I made some very clear decisions around the ‘Breakdown Works’, for example, that I wasn’t going to be taking any stone from the mountain. Having worked in Italy for so long and seeing the scars that the quarries are creating in nature, it’s really brutal. As a result, I discovered a lot of new stones, because I was buying old stone that had been lying in the back of marble yards for decades. That’s how I started using Irish stone as well. I’d been in contact with a few quarries in Ireland, and one of the stones I got was a Kilkenny marble. Similarly, all of the wood that I chose was wood that was dying or had died, or was found in the back of wood yards. Working in this way tied an environmental aspect into the idea of breakdown. JR: The work in your two concurrent shows – at Museo Stefano Bardini in Florence and Pace Gallery in London – have at least in part been developed amid global uncertainty and restrictions. How have these conditions shaped the exhibitions? KFG: Getting lost in the material became a means of controlling my internal anxiety about what was going on outside the studio. It gave me the freedom and the ability to experiment. I was paring down my practice, using whatever I could get my hands on – that raw material. The nucleus of the idea for the ‘Breakdown Works’ started before the pandemic – it was very much to do with my own personal breakdown, the age I am in my life, the shift into mid-life. It was a very intrapersonal experience, and then what happened globally became very salient. The idea around societal breakdown became really key. For years I’ve been trying to build enough confidence as an artist to move away from realism. It takes time but I feel like the bravery and loss of control around the ‘Breakdown Works’
