The Institute Catalogue


Title: Bunny
Artist: Sian James

This early work from James displays a very real sense of urgency and drama, making full use of the blu-tack medium to express so much more than the rabbit gestalt. Indeed, the crenellated blu-tack can be seen as a metaphorical isomorph for the sociological and psychological zeitgeist of our human now.





Title: Cerulean Primate
Artist: Rhiannon Purdie

The peaceful expression on the countenance of Rhiannon Purdie's most famous work, Cerulean Primate, belies the torment of the creative maelstrom in which it was conceptualised. For it is not an ape per se. It is a cypher for man's eternal (non)interconnectedness with the natural world, realised with this artist's characteristic perspicuity, its disingenuous indirectness a paradoxical signifier of its vital directness and its relevance, in real terms, to the anguished unreality of the modern - and yet forbodingly ancient - disjunction of Man and his nearest (this terminology rapaciously encompassing Woman and her nearest, for the sex of the Cerulan Primate is unknown) post-pre-evolutionary relations.





Title: T-Rex
Artist: Graham Wyatt

A typically exuberant Jurassic antiphon from this local artist, who yet again allows the subsumation of his subtextual statement to the essentially naive patina of a jejune aesthetic. 'Abiit, excessit, evasit, erupit,' it says, yet in the very process of this work's creation, we see can see the past brought to life, a spiritual resurgam for all our pasts.





Title: [name withdrawn for copyright reasons. Ed]
Artist: Graham Wyatt

This piece, long misunderstood, is now considered by the cognoscenti artista to be one of the artist's most devastating critiques of contemporary popular mores. At first sight, a simple reproduction of a figure from mass, populist culture (`[name withdrawn for copyright reasons. Ed]`), however more careful analysis tells us that this is base metal turned gold, for by the simple expedient of changing the medium from plasticine to blu-tack, the artist has challenged our most fundamental (mis)conceptions of art, media, and contemporary `culture`, summarized in the following formula:

blu-tack + transposition = TRANSMOGRIFICATION





Title: Fishy
Artist: Graham Wyatt

The artist has kindly supplied the following explanatory words for this piece.

Fishy, fishy,
Swim, swim.

Fishy, fishy, swim.

I watch you in Bristol Docks, above sepia mud.
Are you happy, fishy, playing
there?

Fishy, fishy, be careful!
Beware of men with rods!
They want you for their supper,
They want you for their lunch!

Fishy, fishy,
SWIM! SWIM!

NO!, he can no more,
For now the water is blood red
and fishy, fishy?
He is dead.






Title: Brontosaurus
Artist: Graham Wyatt

Munificent in conception, gnomic and elliptical in execution, this late example of Wyatt's Jurassic series, emboldens the inherent leitmotiv into an universal and literally ethereal metalepsis for the millenial and transitive generic benedictus (we must, [in vain?] fulfilling our genetically programmed(?), hope) that awaits us. Of course we immediately see the humour intended in the piece, for how can, within the apostolic framework in which this work is clearly set, the benediction precede the apocolyptic confutatis that history tells us awaits! Such an interpretation, though superficially plausible, does not signify the piece. We know from the artist's previous work, how religio-eroticism is the fundamental metonyme, therefore, perhaps, though not exclusively, we see in Brontosaurus, the beginning of a new meta-pseudo-conceptualism - conception within conception, meaning buried beyond meaning, leading, force majeure, to a dictum to disaccustom, or perhaps a dicrotic didacticism deeming the duplicitous diatropist discourse?





Title: Stretch
Artist: Rhiannon Purdie

A later work from Rhiannon Purdie, The Stretch embodies the explosive feline stasis, the static Forsprung of the human esprit. It is a mordently satirical expression of the essentially witzereissende spirit with which this artist imbues her work, exemplified not least by the fact that this late piece was ingeniously created ante alios - before much of her later work. The reverberatory blueness of the piece, the jocularity of the figure's leisurely extention juxtaposed with its anhelated yawn, functions as a metaphor for the eternal active-passive paradox of the creative process.