C105 review

Leeds: Liadin Cooke at Henry Moore Institute

Futureshock... GMO, Nike maybe.(Don't want to encourage but...) weeds are hardier, certainly more street, and more widespread than flyposters or billboards. Imagine if they could emerge with Swoosh-shaped leaves. Technology of the curious amaze, enough of a fascination to balance the horror of what is just too interruptive to plantlife - location of our liquid familiation. Remember man that you are water...

London's Irish Embassy or Ireland's London Embassy has a large ballroom as part of its Victorian design. According to Liadin Cooke, the ballroom is encrusted with a Grand Manner ornamentation of abstractions from the natural world - plants, flowers, tendrils, and rampant foliage, described as (now) tasteless but once signaling some licensed fun amongst twirling moustaches, rapid fanning and filled or empty dancecards, as if in a sacred grove or wood, possibly, only a sub-rhetoric of classicism.

Liadin Cooke: Ballroom (ornament), installation shot and detail, 2003; photo Sylvaine Poitau; courtesy Henry Moore Institute

Cooke's installation Ballroom (ornament) consists of a set of red drawings on paper, and a bronze-cast object sitting on the floor of the cosy little room of the Institute's Gallery 4. The thing in the room takes the other linguistic fork away from a Romance root such as ballare. Roomball - what other shape is possible, for this encrustation of floribunda to explode seeds of whatever fertility, but the pod, the testicle, the ovary, or, culturally steeped - the prune? Irregular but pertly upright, the ballish bronze has a democratically applied patterning of tiny growths, at the identificatory level of genus not species - open roses, strands, ferns, sworls, just proud of, or depressing the bodily surface, each surrounded with a touch of personal space. It's like a rather heavy display stand for cheap bracelet charms, emergent but burred and integrated, not rooted, by the casting process.

The stylization of nature possible after Victorian classificatory fervour is up for re-abstraction - undoing of types is freely evident in Cooke's drawings - the re-wildened sense of typical growth, the overwhelming and unstoppable force in desire to fulfill. A slow maturation has taken place, then an acceleration towards conclusion - and no fussiness, or terminating accuracy in sight. Cooke's pre-eminently sensual discourse of surface, ornament, and physical support may not be so obvious without consideration of the levels of stylization that stalk the subject and treatment - but it's the further fading of the import of some invisible ballroom that is clear, sturdy examples of sculptural processing are responsible for it, and to great effect it's neither here nor there.

Initially, like some unofficial commission, Ballroom (ornament) has that kind of artist-in-residence feeling - somewhere between an institutional luxury and doing-good-works-if-we-must, come investigate us, find something 'interesting'. What makes Cooke's proceeds an excellent example of context-survival is that the often artificially motivated spurs of interest are acknowledged as pick-up, and the final work has an inner enthusiasm towards itself which is very difficult to translate for the benefit of a commissioning. However straightforward it could be to iron out with a literalising discourse, finally, the works displayed are less inclined to cough-up in the way their originating suggestion might demand. Parallelism can be found to be included, but adding up to two in simple reflection is rarely satisfactory. The resolution is like this, but it no longer needs anything to resolve outside itself, its new situation. Some help in dissemination of 'core' is the price of surface attractiveness - the pip is usually undigestible. This one fell on fertile ground. An exhortation all at once to the intent, to the origin, to the result, to its surroundings, to its audience - Get out of my garden. It's my wildish place.

Pádraig Timoney is an artist.

Liadin Cooke: Ballroom (ornament), Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, July/October 2003

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