Full of holes

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 34009, 25 November 1975, Page 7

Full of holes

Sculpture by Gypsy and Eddie Poulston is on display in a two-man exhibition at the C.S.A. gallery until December 2.

The mounting of this forty-piece exhibition packed into half the available ground floor gallery, must be the worst of the year. It takes on more of the flavour of a church bazaar than of an exhibition of works whose chief ingredient is an intelligent and sensitive use of space. The choice' of materials, the concentration on skills and techniques, and the scale of the works by both Poulstons make for a general similarity in their work, but Gypsy tends to favour smooth, amorphous, organic forms, while Eddie chooses a geometric, somewhat linear style. Gypsy Poulston’s smooth abstract and abstracted figurative forms in stone and aluminium concentrate on the contrasts of, texture from broken, coarse areas to tense, smooth, satin, and shiny convex passages. Her form is, however, structureless, the one plane or curve uneasily losing itself in another without vari-

ations of tension and hardness, sharpness and bloom. The holes which appear in so many of the pieces do not explore the density of the mass, or cause light tol change its characteristic on I passing through. They are mere absence of material, passive passages making no contribution to the totality, and not explaining the contrasting mass. In one work, however, ‘Flight Series lII,’ a bird-like winged aluminium form, she achieves a refined sense of soaring flight and consolidation of flight motion and energies. Eddie Poulston, with his propensity for things mechanical and geometric, comes across somewhat more strongly in his sculptures than in his wall pieces. | His striated constructions of| textured bundled rods, and his cubic constructions, especially those confined to the horizontal and vertical modes, are the most interesting. Nevertheless, he is still only dressing up in threadbare conventions, making garden gnomes of once avant garde concepts now laid to peace in the glades of historical acceptance. — T. L. Rodney Wilson