Upended

The figure is Sam Harrison's métier—fertile ground for a practice that ranges across sculpture, woodcuts and inks. The title work, Upended, is a female nude modelled in white plaster and presented upside down, balanced on the point of a shoulder with one leg upright and the other folded at a right angle from the hip. The pose is powerful yet prone, with tender modelling that combines grace and strength. Wall drawings depict upended forms drawn in blood with a goat's hair brush, their outline and negative space sensitively describing the female form. A near life-size Self-Portrait from 2019 occupies the gallery entrance—a male nude with an abraided, ossified surface rubbed with blood and wax. The back gallery holds three black works with minimal white. Using pulped flax and plaster, flocked black surfaces that absorb light, Harrison transforms the contour of the female buttock into monumental abstractions. The flocked texture ripples like landscape and shivers like flesh.