Thomas Houseago: What Went Down
Thomas Houseago has come to public prominence in recent years with his monumental, figurative sculptures that are charged with a remarkable energy and vitality.
Houseago works primarily with media that demonstrates a sensibility towards classical sculptural materials and processes; primitive, totemic sculptures are hewn from giant timbers, Hessian is slathered in plaster and crudely wrapped around steel armatures, and largescale, free-standing works are ambitiously cast in bronze. Houseago’s sculptures possess a daring urgency, a tactility and brute physicality that expose the process of their own making. The visible ‘touch’ and ‘imprint’ of the artist are nakedly evident: a fist of plaster is gauged out to create an eye socket, a deft chiselling of redwood to suggest a shoulder blade.
Houseago’s work is unapologetic and relentless in its evocation of classical and modernist sculptural works. His somewhat crude and direct working belies a sophistication that is rich in a layering of cultural, mythological and art historical references. In a time of fast-paced
technological change, Houseago’s art takes on the psychological role of an awkward, unresolved reminder of the past – cumbersome and insistent in its emotional presence.
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