ELLIOT FOX
BUILD/FOUND, MAKE. CONCEAL/HIDE/KEEP SAFE. PUT TOGETHER, COMPOSE
HYPHA GALLERY ∙ FEBRUARY 2025 ∙ LONDON
Group show featuring Bo Sun, Elliot Fox, Emma Papworth, Gabriela Pelczarska, Janek Nixon, Laura Kazaroff, Laurence Owen, Savannah du Quercy, Tom Sewell.
The city is an archive, gathered and held together by invisible decisions. Each material carries a history of use and disuse; to build is to assemble, to si: through what is le: behind, to reconstruct meaning from the discarded. What if the act of collecting, concealing, and recomposing within these spaces of precarity allowed for something to be constructed anew; something looser, less complete, a free plan in which things work together without being held in place? Found materials pulled into new alignments, objects nested within objects, structures emerging from debris. Here, making is a practice of reconfiguration. What resists dissolution finds a new form. To reconfigure is to read the city’s margins, to understand its undercurrents, to locate value in what has been cast aside. Each composition is a site of both excavation and invention. A fragment can be a foundaton. A space can be a shelter. What is built is never static—it is held together, for now.
These two works are connected in their use of Copper Sulphate as an analogy for time. They are objects that attempt to allude to a hybridization of functional forms that already exist in our world, having been cross-pollinated by ourselves through our lived experience. The copper sulphate is referenced throughout my work as this element which appeared and dominated disused mines in spectacular fashion after we had gone. The idea that time is cyclical and not linear is a repeated motif throughout my work and the kinetic reference of ‘Refracted Cycle’ to time, units of time and instruments of time is apparent both through its movement but also this conceptual underpinning. Both pieces attempt to architecturally integrate into the infrastructure of the space and this is an important asset of the work. I see them as the visual iceberg tip underneath which lies a network of invisible energy systems which govern our behaviour and how we develop cultures between one another.
‘Microscopic Blossom’ Thermoplastic, Steel, Chrome Plated Copper, Fresnel Lens, Copper Sulphate, Resin, Brass Fixings.650 x 600 x 500 mm. 2024.ELLIOT FOX