James Fuller

The Cart Before the Horse

2 May - 8 June 2024

South Parade is pleased to present The Cart Before the Horse, James Fuller’s second solo exhibition at the gallery, continuing its long-standing commitment to his sculptural practice.

Through fragile surfaces of copper, beeswax and textiles, Fuller sketches out curious technological visions, by mining the imagery and language of newly published patents. Extracted moments of incidental poetry permeate the works and provide alternative visibility on which to pin collective consciousness. 

The first moments as you enter the gallery might present a feeling of emptiness, meaning giving way to gravity and pooling on the floor. A series of Fuller’s ultra-thin electroplated foils offer a cautious welcome. Continuous conductive metal skins — tenths of a millimetre thick that have been slowly grown in tanks of electrolytic solution — take up this vulnerable space communing at your feet. Engraved texts circulate the folded and stitched surfaces, caught like whispers in a colliding glass well, circling a plughole that’s not forthcoming.

The same cannot be said for the soaps in the bathroom, an earlier but ongoing durational work from the artist.

Elsewhere things become a bit more confrontational, two large full-colour images on embroidery mesh adhered to thick fabric mattress wadding stretch out the time between two sequential frames of moving image. Sitting amongst them is a wax vase-like vessel with smooth guts and rough external faces. A single engraved drawing wrapping around its swollen diameter, the cart before the horse.

This talismanic object depicts a recently published patent (2023) for a speculative horse-powered vehicle, where the required clean energy for forward motion is generated by an actual horse on a treadmill behind the driver via gyroscopic generators. Simultaneously replaying the common analogy for doing things the wrong way around or worse, getting ahead of yourself.

Described as talismanic, as it represents the sticky and illusive territory Fuller’s practice likes to inhabit. For several years, the artist has been wading through the ever-evolving data stack of newly filed or renewed patents, through different seasons and states of mind, as if landscapes for painting. Filtering ambitions and speculations for protection — the playful and the absurd — the logical and the surreal. 

These sensations are anchored into copper, beeswax, and earth minerals — the original subjects long left behind in these cut-up translations, which perhaps start to work against human exceptionalism and highlight the awkward pace of innovation; one finger in the plug socket and another touching earth.

In this other world, everything is momentarily stable, but it can all be over in an instant, crushed like an empty can of soda or deformed by careless placement in the midday sun.

James Fuller (b. 1988, UK) lives and works in Athens, Greece. Working predominantly in sculpture Fuller’s practice pursues experimental processes that operate in the sensitive space between industrial and domestic settings. These include and are not limited to rotational moulding, electroplating and CNC laser cutting. He received an MA in Sculpture from the Royal College of Art, UK in 2018. Recently selected solo and duo presentations include slow soft shell, Artissima with Georgina Hill (Turin, IT, 2023), Sealed from the Inside, Art-O-Rama (Marseille, FR, 2022) and Perfect Living, South Parade (London, UK, 2021). Recently selected group presentations include Channelling for Outset Studiomakers corridor commission at Frieze London, UK (2023), Beyond Fear (curated by Un Processed Realities), Cultural Foundation of Tinos Island (Tinos, GR, 2023), Cloud & Toe (curated by Jessie Hogan), Knulp (Sydney, AUS, 2023), Portable Elastic Temple, Pet Projects (Athens, GR, 2023) and Material Poetics, South Parade at The Shop at Sadie Coles (London, UK, 2023) and Contemporary Sculpture Fulmer 2022 edition, UK. In 2018, he was awarded the following awards: Kenneth Armitage Sculpture Prize, Tiffany’s x Outset Award, Gilbert Bayes Scholarship, Stapely Trust Educational Grant and Leathersellers’ Award.