by Kiriakos Spirou

London-based artist and designer Kathy Dalwood has arranged a soirée like no other. Her collection of plaster busts, set as a bizarre banquet for a mysterious gathering of characters, is now on display at Pitzhanger Manor / PM Gallery & House in London and it will be open through June 9th, 2013.

Inspired by the lushness and debauchery of Baroque feasts, the exhibition is more like a well-thought art installation: where Dalwood’s busts stand among candelabra and an assembly of everyday items and junk, all covered in plaster, put together like towers of food and luxurious decoration. Through this all-white extravaganza of everyday cheap things like plastic flowers and fruit, beer cans, paper coffee cups, cheap glasses from junk/charity shops and cigarette packets, Kathy Dalwood creates an ironic illusion of opulence, as if the horn of Amalthea is flowing out of Tesco bags. As a result, her installation becomes a humorous comment on both today’s definitions of value, quality and luxury, and how these concepts can be seen as relative and debatable. And part of the installation’s success is of course its dramatic Baroque saturation effect, especially when seen from a distance..... read on

By Maria Blyzinsky

The pixie curators of Pitzhanger Manor have done it again.............Visitors can walk through the ground floor historic interiors and be confronted by a series of tables groaning under the weight of an opulent dinner party. The surfaces are laden with bizarre-looking dishes vying for space among even stranger table decorations: platters of lobster and fruits de mer, baskets toppling with exotic fruit, mouth-watering cakes crowned with miniature figurines, vases of dried flowers mixed with kitchen utensils, boxes of petits fours and other tempting amuse-bouches. It can be difficult to tell which are intended for the gastronomic feast and which are meant purely for visual effect. But it doesn’t really matter because the spread is suffused with a ghostlike quality: everything has been created from brilliant white plaster, set against a jet black cloth. Even the plates, cutlery and trimmings are the hue of meringues, whipped cream and icing sugar, as if the chef might be some weird ‘Jack Frost/Heston Blumenthal’ hybrid, with the Snow Queen as guest of honour ...read on

Busts and natural collisions

. . . . . . Enter the Soane Suite and you'll be greeted with a sculptural banquet created by London-based artist and designer Kathy Dalwood. This is her "Secret Society" (trying very very hard to ignore naive Selma Blair's incantation in Cruel Intentions) with a very unusual guest list of ecccentric characters with names like Mme Maigret, Gold Digger, Ms Chattanooga and Aviatrix. The sixty-four busts, almost all of which are female, are part of Dalwood's ongoing series of work, which she started three years ago, when funnily enough, she wandered around Sir John Soane's Museum looking at 19th century busts and was inspired to take this recognisable sculptural format and give them a contemporary shake-up. Their link up with fashion isn't immediately apparent as the intention is that from a distance, they look like they could well be conventional busts depicting the guarded image of important people. . . .read on

Interestingly enough, “casting about” is a term that originates from one of the oldest arts known to man: hunting. It isn’t, however, necessarily just about the ravenous search for game; the hounds would cast about for a long-lost scent, for the spoor of an animal that, whilst missing, is retained in memory. Many of Dalwood’s sculptures - like the one pictured above (“Aviatrix”) - carry the whiff of a reverent classicism. Her works betray a number of spirited yet precarious returns, fresh in their own right, to the many renditions of classicism that have persisted throughout history. . . . . . . . .. . . . . . .read on