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Formless, an exhibition of installations, was curated by Franz Ehmann. He included six artists, connecting them loosely in pairs - Jacinta Bennink and Sebastian di Mauro, Susan Ostling and Stephen Roberts, Nameer Davis and Barbara Penrose. Each artist interpreted the curator's intention slightly differently, but all related to a certain 'liquefaction', creating work which fell outside the frame of traditional formats.
It is difficult to dissociate my response to this exhibition from the olfactory, thanks to the relatively delicate odour of the olive oil in Sebastian Di Mauro's work and the more pungent aroma of Susan Ostling's potatoes. Di Mauro's work was a pleasantly odorous field associating biographic and more 'recuperative' references. Ostling's Starry Night positioned potato sproutings on the wall of the space, the horizontality of the potato's typical earthbound existence being transformed into this astral application, while the aroma in the room grew more flavoursome as time went on.
The installations of Di Mauro and Jacinta Bennink complemented each other ably, Bennink working with stacks of folded paper dipped in beeswax, suspended somewhat above the floor-level work of Di Mauro. The suspension of the work at mouth-level made for a slightly unexpected body-twist, with an almost oral consumption of the taste, smell and texture of the work being required. The silence of Bennink's work hovered over Di Mauro’s field of fragments of language and the two installations, displaying like sensibilities in their approach to the formless, were very much in tune.
Stephen Roberts's spiral choreography of three hundred glazed clay vessels employed a Japanese cloud design to allude to the cosmos. His work gestured skyward, also implying transcendence. The ostensible connection between Roberts' and Ostling 's works was