Spherical sadness

Richard presents a new body of sculptures and wall based works, using a broad array of material and processes, each combined and collided to conjure specific ideas of place and time. Hughes is interested in the allure of the past and the idea of regression, through repeated motifs which are central to his practice he allows us to witness some kind of time travel; a frustrated relationship between then and now. In Spherical sadness, Hughes draws on the language of material to continue his pursuit of duality. Encouraging a heightened sense of awareness; he uses texture and temperature to allude to both earthly and spiritual places, both familiar and distant. Presenting the profound in a reductive and macro state. Within the show both physical and meta physical components are placed together, by doing this Hughes is trying to comment on the symbiotic and parallel nature of the physical and spiritual world. For Hughes, nothing is singular and nothing is without history or consequence. Drops of solid metal, drawn from the earth, cause and react with layers of material, each assemblage a kin to a different place and time. Personal to the artist or universal to us all, the images within the exhibition are used as a kind of portal; the material being drawn into the centre of each sculpture, thus narrating the image or the image giving context to the material, both falling out and in of the work. The idea of inbetween-ness is important to Hughes's practice and is evident within the exhibition. The reflective surface blurring and morphing with the very particular architecture of the gallery space, with a sense of morphing states whereby the work is being made or to be demonstrating some kind of plausible functionality. Drawing on his own interest in History, Hughes manipulates objects conjured from a romantic sense of the past. A violin, strings cut, body severed and placed isolated in the corner of the space reflect on the demise of the human state, an anxious age with regular devastation and crisis. The title of the exhibition itself suggestive of a globe, a race, unhappy and spinning repeatedly into crisis. Time is used as material, the work seems to theoretically and conceptually slice up the time-based elements of the objects and symbols present within the space, there arrangements and assemblages working to stitch them back together; extract meaning and tell a new story.