Abstract:
In the work of Simon Esling, the architectural, the bodily and the mechanical achieve a kind of synthesis. Strange Frankenstein constructions of bone, concrete and timber emerge, startlingly, from the back of minutely rendered military vehicles. Towering, teetering structures float weirdly in mid-air over hazy pastoral landscapes. The body, dismembered, is represented with clinical anatomical precision. Its inner workings are revealed: minus the envelope of skin they are like struts, joists, dovetail joints. There is a sense of suspense, or suspension: the works seem to hover between ideas of construction and destruction, progress and constraint. They are made with meticulous care but allude to violence. They refer to growth and building, but are comprised of fragments.