SCULPTURE 2011

If Ducker’s previous sculptures turned the detritus of consumer culture into monuments to our obsession with things, this new work turns monumental sculptural tropes into dumb chunks of material poised precariously between ugliness and fascination. ‘Blockhead’ seems to speak of rough marble as a trace of the hand of the artist, yet its grammar and syntax - from the material used, polystyrene, to the disproportionate metal ‘plinth’ from which it collapses - do not quite grasp and relay an intended meaning. Like dyslexic writing, it leaves us uncertain as to whether it is profoundly poetic or badly structured. ‘Dark Matter’ appears to quote a monochromatic tradition, but on close inspection the black shards, insulating material covered in flock, have just as much in common with the discarded props of a pre CGI sci-fi movie, when such concoctions had to make do as interstellar debris floating in deep space or the rough surface of a new planet. Failing to resolve into either sense or nonsense, Ducker’s sculptures turn the artist’s own alienation from language into a shared bodily experience. In these works, now as before, we are deceived by objects and failed by language, left in conflict between desire and meaning, daftness and poetry.

-  Patrizia Di Bello, 2011, Professor , School of History of Art, Film and Visual Media, Birkbeck College