DUST TO DUST

Sid Motion and Tom Cole would like to thank the Abakanowicz Arts and Culture Charitable Foundation and The Polish Cultural Institute, London for their generous help and support of the exhibition.

Thanks to Fondation Toms Pauli, Lausanne, Switzerland 
for the generous loan of Abakanowicz’s 'Abakan 29'.

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Magdalena Abakanowicz (1930–2017) was born in Falenty, Poland. She emerged as a young artist in a country devastated by the Second World War, bestowing her with a unique perspective that has unfurled through a distinct sculptural vocabulary including an innovative approach to materials and figurative forms. Robert Hughes in Time Magazine referred to Abakanowicz’s “dark vision of primal myth” and Barbara Rose, in her monograph, Magdalena Abakanowicz (Abrams, 1994), to the artist as “a shaman who receives and transmits messages in a visual language that is more universal than words.” Abakanowicz has had over 150 solo exhibitions in Europe, North and South America, Japan, South Korea, and Australia. She has exhibited at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Jardins du Palais Royal in Paris, and the Muzeum Narodowe in Poznań. Most recently, she is the subject of a major retrospective at London’s Tate Modern called Every Tangle of Thread and Rope (through 2023). Previous museum solo exhibitions include the Palacio de Cristal, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, and Institut Valencià de Arte Modern (IVAM), Valencia, both in 2008, and the Fondazione Arnaldo Pomodoro, Milan, in 2009. Several works were exhibited in the Energy and Process wing at the Tate Modern for the duration of 2010, and her survey The Human Adventure was exhibited at the Akbank Art Center, Istanbul, in 2013.

Phoebe Cummings (b.1981) studied Three-Dimensional Crafts at the University of Brighton before completing an MA in Ceramics & Glass at the Royal College of Art in 2005. Cummings works predominantly using unfired clay to make poetic and performative sculptures and installations that emphasise materiality, fragility, time, creation and decay. Cummings’ impressive interventions are often constructed directly on site, allowing an instinctive development of tensions between object and location. Cummings questions what we will carry forward into the future by producing intricate, hand made and exquisitely delicate sculptures based on ancient plants and primitive ritual, imbued with a sense of magic and mysticism. She has undertaken a number of artist residencies, in the UK, USA and Greenland, including a three-month Arts/Industry residency at the Kohler Co. factory, Wisconsin (2008) and six months as ceramics artist-in-residence at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London (2010). Cummings was selected as the winner of the British Ceramics Biennial Award in 2011. She was awarded the second ceramics fellowship at Camden Arts Centre, London (2012–2013) was the inaugural winner of the Woman’s Hour Craft Prize and was shortlisted for the Arts Foundation Awards 2018. She was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by the University of Brighton in 2019 and is Research Associate at the Ceramics Research Centre - UK, University of Westminster. Recent exhibitions include A Matter of Life and Death, Thomas Dane Gallery, Naples, 2022, To Walk in the Image, Lismore Castle Arts, Cork, 2023, The Shape of Things: Still Life in Britain, Pallant House, Chichester, 2024.

Robert Mapplethorpe (1946-1989) was born in Queens, USA. Mapplethorpe acquired a Polaroid camera in 1970 from artist and filmmaker Sandy Daley. In 1973, he had his first exhibition at the Light Gallery, New York. In 1975, he began using a Hasselblad camera to create still lifes, interiors, nudes, portraits and self-portraits. His studio-based work is notable for its great formal precision. Mapplethorpe also photographed his circle of friends and celebrities, including Patti Smith, and he accepted commissions for Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine. In the late 1970s, he documented the New York sadomasochistic scene and published the X Portfolio in 1978 which depicted homoerotic and sadomasochistic subjects. In 1990, the inclusion of some of these explicit images in his major retrospective, The Perfect Moment, at the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, Ohio ignited a fierce public debate in America about censorship and public funding of the arts. His vast, provocative, and powerful body of work has established him as one of the most important artists of the twentieth century. Today his work can be found in the collections of major museums around the world. His legacy lives on through the work of the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation which he established in 1988.