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So also courageous is Jim Unsworth's "Eden". But in a totally different way. Rarely does one see a British artist display such riotous irreverence and get away with it. Unsworth works mostly with found metal objects welded to construct large animist-looking sculpture which seems official, visceral, voracious, delicate, dangerous, carefree and so surprising all at the same time. During the 1 993 Open Studios show a young girl fed a bun to one of Unsworth's pieces because she thought it looked hungry. There can be no greater accolade. "Eden" has all the Unsworth specialties, though made mainly of wood and rubber. Using very simple material means, Unsworth integrates semi-naturalistic colouring with naturalistic space to produce an image of great expressive potency. The paint really works: just look at those dribbles. I particularly like the unexpectedness of the contrast between the sinuosities (spotted snakes? tendrils tender as a human arm yet hawser-tough?) and the up-ended wooden square below. with all its retained accidents and intimations of worm-infested sludge. The whole image reeks of unspecified rain forest terrors. This is a very uncertain paradise. An atavistic work; the memory of it clings uneasily to the mind. "A new shudder"? Perhaps. We've certainly come a long way from "Ophelia". One thinks of David Smith's "how long does it take for a monster to become beautiful?"
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