SCULPTURE 2001-2008

Emotionally evocative without ever telling a clear story, affecting without being obvious, Ducker’s sculptures seem to be there with the mute theatricality of minimalism, yet to engage with notions of transformation. With simple formal means, they excavate fears, anxieties and desires associated with the most visceral of physical sensations - attraction and repulsion, pleasure and pain, need and self-sufficiency. The work keeps referring back to the body, a missing body we as viewers cannot help but imagine filling-in for with our own, transforming it into the ill-fitting piece of a jigsaw we are trying in vain to complete with our presence.  

 - Patrizia Di Bello, 2008, Professor , School of History of Art, Film and Visual Media, Birkbeck College

Ducker’s ideas and objects are influenced by diverse sources and paradigms that he brings together with a characteristic bravura. The sculptural objects he makes are at times both somber and mischievous, often imbued with a sassy knowingness. Straying deliberately into various genres such as the sexually charged fetish object or metaphorically overloaded ‘memento mori’, we encounter a rich conflation of image and object that uses and abuses our notions of taste and cliché and turns them upside down. Success in Ducker’s work lies in use of process and skillful manipulation of these diverse physical elements that add up to a kind of dyslexic personal poetry and grabs us by the collar with both humor and pathos.

 - Matt Franks, 2008, Artist, Subject Leader in Sculpture, Camberwell College of Art

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