Quench Gallery presents Tomato Potato, a series of Clara Hastrups’s ongoing ‘Instant Sculptures’. Begun during the domestic confines of lockdown, this body of work takes its initial inspiration from the natural world and the scenes inside travel magazines when existence was spatially confined, and adventure a memory. They stand in relation to the sublime, and larger than life moments within easily overlooked objects of our everyday. A person slides down the pith of a curling orange peel. Ash from a cigarette scatters out of Mount Fuji. The head of a flamingo stands in place for the flame of a lighter. In so doing, they derive their power from a strong sense of organic forces ready at any moment to disrupt, if not destroy a fragile man-made order. Blue paper, originally found in the street, indexes the series while also alluding to the grand expanses of sky and ocean. Static in form, each photograph is charged with the suggestion of an act, process or event between unexpected organic and man-made forms. A hammer prohibits a balloon from deflating, embracing this tension. Within these pared-back margins, Hastrup creates unlikely encounters and speculative narratives – to sometimes comic effect – addressing the concerns of consumerism and the proliferation of throwaway and mass-produced objects. A bejewelled belly-button piercing decorating an orange’s peduncle is case in point. Hastrup believes in something beyond the everyday and challenges the illusory certainty of form through humour and play of the organic and artificial. Equally energetic, Hastrup’s practice transcends the utility of objects. When the surface pleasure of the images give way to the feeling of excessive material consumption of late capitalist society, the work speaks to darker more urgent concerns. Within this dichotomy, Hastrup’s examinations, executed through humour, give agency to seemingly useless
objects while questioning the meanings derived from daily mass consumption.
Clara Hastrup was born in Aarhus, Denmark and is currently based in London.
She graduated with a BA(hons) in Fine Art – Painting/printmaking from Glasgow School of Art in 2016 and received a Post-graduate Diploma in Fine Arts from the Royal Academy Schools, London in 2021.
Recent exhibitions include “Prickly Tunes”, UK Mexican Arts Society, “Sorry it’s a mess – we’ve just moved in”, LAMB Gallery, “RA Schools Show 2021”, Royal Academy of Arts and “Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2020”, South London Gallery.
