Sharing

Tony Cragg is one of the most important and influential sculptors of our time. He first came to international prominence in the early 1980s with a body of work that explored the sculptural possibilities of everyday objects, such as containers, bits of discarded plastics and glass, even frisbees and bricks that he reconstructed into representational forms, inviting his viewers to reflect on their relationship to materials, both natural and man-made. For Cragg, “The need to know both objectively and subjectively more about the subtle fragile relationships between us, objects, images and essential natural processes and conditions is becoming critical.” Sharing forms part of Cragg’s body of work begun in the late 1980s, in which the sculptural material functions, in his words, “as a metaphor for cell, organ, organism or body.” On one level, the sculpture is a combined representation of the faces of three members of Cragg’s team, bound together in the shared skin of the continuous perforated bronze; on another, Sharing is a figuration of Cragg’s enduring interrogation of the porousness of human thought. “Positive or negative we are constructed as much from what we are as from what we take in,” Cragg has averred.

© Anthony Douglas Cragg / SOCAN (2021)