Corporations are already selling off mining rights to asteroids. These massive balls of rock and ore and minerals and ice up in space, far out of the reach of humanity, and mostly named after ancient Greek or Roman goddesses, are being traded like real estate by greedy suits with telescopes.
There are half a dozen asteroids in American sculptor Liz Larner’s exhibition at Camden Art Centre, her first institutional exhibition in the UK, plonked on the floor like they’ve just burned through the atmosphere on their way in from space. Each one is based on a Nasa scan of a real asteroid and then re-formed out of glittery, gritty ceramic. They’re gleaming symbols of corporate greed, ecological collapse and sexism – comets of misery, sent from the future to crash land on Finchley Road.
Feminism, ecology, post-humanism – you’re only beginning to scratch the surface of Larner’s complex, heavily referential, ultra-layered approach to sculpture, which she’s been honing since the 1980s in Los Angeles. Throughout the rest of this show you bump into references to art history, literature, music, grammar, mythology, Japanese kintsugi. It’s dizzying, confusing, a bit bewildering. It’s almost all new ceramic and plastic works, with a few older pieces dotted around the place.
The exhibition functions as a sort of bleak hike across a scarred, arid landscape. Slabs of rock and mounds of plastic are pinned to the wall, boulders litter the ground, rubbish has been strung across the ceiling. As you meander through like an amateur geologist, you see cracks and crevices in stone, rocks split apart, shards of gold. The slab works on the wall – all made of ceramic – look like fossils of mesozoic fungal growths.
The best slab works are pockmarked with agates and marble and crystal, or have cracked down the middle like broken fossils. Two have shattered into pieces, laying splintered across the floor.
Some of the slabs are stunning: they feel heavy, earthy, ancient, primordial. Others look a bit like big decorative dinner plates. The little clusters of plastic detritus – discarded single-use spoons and cups tied together – form sculptural mini-galaxies out of rubbish. They’re great.
Most of the newer plastic and ceramic works make aesthetic sense shown together like this, but the show starts to stumble when it widens the conceptual net. There are a handful of early sculptures: fractured metal tubes twisted into the shapes of smiles, and a network of ribbons, hair and measuring tapes stretched across the gallery. It’s hard to see what relationship these have to the ceramics. Worst of all is the newest piece, a sleek, gaudy, golden arch with a hand and a bird’s foot perched on top of it, all in reference to the mythological figure of Lilith. It’s not a good sculpture, and it makes no sense next to everything else on display. Whacking together works from different eras, in different materials, with different ideas, just hasn’t worked here.
Choosing to focus on new ceramic works instead of properly introducing this relatively little-known American artist with a survey or retrospective is a strange choice that doesn’t service the audience. This result is a muddled, disparate, confusing mishmash of an introduction to an artist whose career deserved a simpler, easier way in.
A lot of what Larner’s done here is great. There’s a sense of dismay to a lot of the work, like Larner has looked at the world around her – with its ecological collapse, its mounds of rubbish, its politics of greedy mining and extraction, its sexism and selfishness and injustice – and felt sheer panic, total distress. These newer sculptures are a way of processing that. It’s as if by creating her own asteroids, her own crystal forms and slabs of earth, she can make sense of what’s happening to the world. It doesn’t always work – but then the world doesn’t always make sense, either.
• At Camden Art Centre, London, until 17 January
