"wherein to catch the conscious of our kings."
Shakespeare, Hamlet, III.2
The new works by Barbara Frey extend her earlier engagement of motifs and forms referencing functional forms. Their functional referents notwithstanding, Frey's works are sculptural. These tugboat teapots are forever run aground on their integral base of rocks. The crowns are too large to wear.
The tugboat teapots, and the crowns, are seemingly composed of sticks and stones cemented together with mortar, and of hollow bones.1 The mortar, sticks, and stones and hollow bones are not what they seem, of course, but are fabricated from porcelain. The illusion is often astonishingly compelling, especially so for the stones, which are representations of conglomerates worn by time and wave to become smoothed and rounded. The seeing-in2 entailed obtains at the level of facture of the separate component simulacra of natural objects, as well as at the level of their composition into forms referencing cultural objects. Seeing-in is not a seeing of entities as what they are, but as if they are something else. The works, through the dual seeing-in of viewer response which they elicit in which illusion is rendered visible as such, are a correlative of the rendering the illusion of ideology visible as such.
A tugboat teapot suggests both the workmanlike utility and helpfulness of a tugboat, and the civility of the social act of preparing a shared beverage and the conversation it fosters. Apart from the formal function of supporting and presenting the tugboat teapot form, the rocks on which the teapot is aground suggests the abrogation of this useful helpfulness and civilizing sharing, a metaphor for a dysfunctional society.
Frey's crowns are too massive and outsized for even the most egregiously self-aggrandized head. A crown too massive and large to be wearable nevertheless functions symbolically as a metaphor for power and dominion.
The illusory rocks, sticks, bones, for all their wornness and broken hollowness, allude to another temporal scale perduring beyond the transitory agency of the exercise of power.