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The Space Between Us

“Sophie Dicken’s series of black and sepia drawings exploring the spatial and psychological relationships between interactive figures represent a pivotal moment in her career. As an artist equally at home with figurative and abstract sculpture, she moves fluently between assemblages of wooden elements that are often cast in bronze and potent outline-and-wash drawings on paper.These drawings exist in their own right as autonomous artworks but might also influence future sculptures.They are at the forefront of a new phase of development.

Figuration, that is the representation of human figures and creatures from the living world, has continued to be problematic for even twenty-first century artists since the early Modernists swept it away in the delirious experimentations at the turn of the twentieth century.

For many artists and collectors today, especially those who have chosen a path that questions or rejects the primacy of Marcel Duchamp’s once anarchic conceptualism or the cultural profundity of Pop Art, the long shadow of abstract sculptors from Jean Arp and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy to Donald Judd and Carl Andre has endorsed an aesthetic of formal ‘purity’ that requires to be ‘uncontaminated’ by reference to the human condition. Such utopian abstraction, however, is only one connecting line between modernist pioneers and twenty-first century practice. Alongside it exists that other, equally significant pathway, that of sculptors Constantin Brancusi and Henry Moore, or painters Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso who move freely between two and three-dimensional expression.These artists maintain the human subject as the significant core of their practice, allowing the rigors of geometry to create an infrastructure that modifies and strengthens their experiments with bodily form. Brancusi, for example, carved human features as low curved relief planes just lifting out of pure ovoid shapes, while Matisse simplified his figures into either fluent contour curves or cutout silhouettes emphasizing the elasticity of the human body. Sophie works within this tradition, generalizing her slightly elongated but muscular human figures into planar or flowing forms who are certainly not recognisable individuals – their small heads contain no facial features – but are unmistakeably gendered, and engaged in a huge range of interactions: dancing, wrestling, fighting, kissing, banging their heads together, in step and out of step. Hers is very much a contemporary project, but one rooted in knowledge of the universalizing values of classicism through her background in art history. The simplicities of the male figure, for example, suggest the hard geometrical outlines and broad-shouldered proportions of an archaic Greek kouros. And the spaces between couples as defined in her drawings relate to those of her non- representational sculptural assemblages where she shifts abstract forms into strange and unexpected juxtapositions: sundered apart or re-united in a different spatial context.

Sophie started this series of square drawings on thick, heavy Bockingford paper during a period when her husband was away for two months pursuing his career as a singer in Australia. This enforced separation led her to think about marital relationships and the notion of ‘the space between’ as both the physical space of separation and the metaphorical divisions between partners or generally between men and women. Initially the drawings explored and gave visual form to her own affection, loneliness, longing and annoyance at his absence, but inevitably, the series extended into a more generic project about human interactions.

Line drawings almost always belong to seriality.That is to say, the condition of ‘connectivity’ of lines, whether enwrapping contours or abstract scribbles, means that drawings fluently extend themselves. A single line continues to lengthen as long as the hand holding the drawing implement – a pencil or a brush soaked in wash – is not raised from the paper support to end its passage and begin another sequence of movements, interruptions and cessations. What cannot be completed or initiated on one piece of paper suggests the next in a related series.To the extent that drawing is visual thinking, one idea inevitably leads to another. Subject-matter extends itself and grows into themes that demand to be explored. In this sense, Sophie’s project grew naturally and was fed by those everyday activities and surrounding visual images that stimulate artists in inchoate and invisible ways. For example, a much-hyped story in the British media about a celebrity break-up and extremely public divorce found formal expression in a series of drawings of fighting couples. In one drawing the male figure is brutally twisting the nose of his partner, in another an exaggerated dark red arm moves out aggressively towards the shrinking female. She retaliates bravely in a further sheet and seizes her tormentor by the neck.

Sophie’s sculptures, in line with contemporary practice are not elevated on pedestals but stand on the ground, or, in the case of her witty animal series, run up the corners and angles of real architectural spaces and places. By contrast, in some of these satirical drawings, the male figures perches on a plinth or a turntable, playing God to his accommodating or warring female partner. In each drawing the couples are united by the quality of the thick, confident pencil contour but the female figure is often differentiated from her darker mate by a paler sepia/pink wash.The spaces between the pair are defined by a heavy black or contrasting sepia infill that transforms the ‘negative’ space into a vibrant topography of unification or separation. Occasionally the thick paper support is attacked, torn or cut, with collaged elements that recall the processes of Sophie’s sculpture making, where deliberately sawn pieces of wood or rougher found elements are glued together to form new unities. Each drawing is a complete work, but all of them together form a fascinating narrative that is sometimes humorous, sometimes tender and sometimes about anger and rejection. The series begins with two sepia figures turning their backs on each other, separated by a symbolically dark and widening wedge of alienation. In the final drawing two grey-washed figures turn their backs on the spectator and waltz off into a warm sepia-red future, hand in hand.”

Professor Deanna Petherbridge CBE