JAMESPLUMB & Garcé Dimofski: UntitledFeb 21 – Apr 12, 2025

There is a purposeful ambiguity at play – a looseness of language, a surplus of meaning, a defying of categorisation. Embracing multiplicity, these works are a reflection of their makers, the artist-designers JAMESPLUMB and Garcé Dimofski.

The work of James Russell and Hannah Plumb asks questions about what is lost and what is acquired through time. Drawn to found materials and time-worn surfaces, the pair explore ideas of history, permanence and preservation, revealing the entropy and poetry of all things.

The ‘Stone (Weathered)’ series, at first glance, brings to mind the paintings of Malevich, Motherwell and Morandi – compositions that are gentle yet dramatic, their subtleties creating an exaggerated sensitivity to tone and texture. Cut to a depth of 35mm to mimic the thickness of a painter’s canvas, the shapes that dance across the surface of the stone are, in fact, more akin to the photographic image than to painting – their medium being light and time.

Salvaged from a single stoneyard, the pieces of Bath stone – offcuts and remnants of the city’s elegant Georgian architecture – had been piled high and left to the elements. Untouched for years, the stone acts like photographic paper, producing an imprint of how the stones were laid one atop another – an image made in positive and negative.

Soft, pale surfaces are set against darker, rougher sections – a patina earned through years of exposure to sunlight, pollution, wind and rain. Between the two tones appears another: a thin dividing line, an almost imperceptible halo – sometimes a charcoal-like smudge, which brings to mind the cave drawings of Lascaux, and at other times a white-hot blur, like the haze at the sun’s edge.

Compositions appear over a single surface, or emerge across two or three pieces – the image puzzled together across a divide. These interactions produce irregular outlines that break free from any association with the canvas in order to suggest something of their original architectural function – the staggered arrangements that are typical of brickwork and building blocks.

Similarly, pieces by Clio Dimofski & Olivier Garcé are often presented in diptych and triptych – their thin, shell-like forms hanging on the wall in pairs and clusters. Enigmatic, unknowable and undefined, the gently curved clay sits proud on the wall, creating a shadowy void behind each luminous surface.

Painted with metallic glaze, the swirling minerals and manganese resemble rusted metal or degraded film stock. Brown, bronze and blue intermingle, like petrol on water. Copper-toned pink is daubed on burgundy. Brass and pewter glint and flash, areas of polish against tarnish.

Pigments are applied with a combination of experience and faith. The unfired colours are not those that emerge from the kiln – red becomes blue, blue becomes red – and so the finished work is a revelation to the maker, as it is to the audience. There is a similar element of chance at play in the ‘Stone (Weathered)’ series, however, rather than generating change themselves, the work of JAMESPLUMB is to uncover and expose that which has already occurred.

The kiln births pieces that are characterised by a sense of delicacy, and others that are an expression of solidity, weight and heft. Like chunks of rock quarried from the landscape, the sloping sides of Garcé Dimofski’s pedestals bulge and dip, their convex and concave faces trimmed with delightfully crisp edges. Smeared with broad brushstrokes in shades of Carravaggio brown, the dark surfaces seem to writhe and shimmer.

‘Sitting. Weighting. IV’ by JAMESPLUMB is a work of similar proportions; a narrow section of Bath stone is set within a larger steel unit, whose inky colour developed in reaction to the elements, in much the same way as the stone. An outsized support or misshapen frame, the blackness of the steel reads as a void rather than a presence: a suggestion of what might have been, the larger piece from which the stone was originally cut. The negative to the positive.

Ambiguous yet immutable, each pair – a duet – produces objects that exist in the space between: between one voice and the other; between disciplines and categories; between the object and its environment; the individual and the collective.