Chicory Miles offers two cast-bronze pieces in this show. Her Churning of the Milk hangs from the ceiling. It appears to be a pod-like vessel, though the opening is too high to be in sight. The pod is composed of bulbous organic forms which resemble hanging breasts, as the title would indicate. They are abstracted such that some have a narrower, cucumber shape so that they may be read as vegetable despite the indication of nipples on their tips. The female body is often associated with the organic, and specifically in art history with fruit or flowers. The seed-pod offered here is an interestingly indirect metaphor, suggesting the protective quality of the womb as well as its more usually represented fecundity. Despite the formal resolution of the piece as sculpture its subject being an arrangement of breasts is a somewhat grotesque play on the typical comparisons. Chicory was heavily pregnant during Katrina and felt that her own fertility carried extraordinary responsibility. Although not shown in this exhibition, she made a fascinating film, also called The Churning of the Milk shortly after the storm which displaces the more direct concerns about rebuilding to a metaphorical and poetic commentary on the responsibility of bringing life into the world. In this case then, we may suggest that she is her own subject and that her condition as artist-mother is something she is addressing in relation to a far wider understanding of the role of creativity.
Earose is a sculptural form consisting of several circular clusters of human-shaped ears. In each circle the ears radiate and overlap from the middle, like petals of a flower. Some of the circles overlap at points; causing the piece to resemble both flowers and bacterial cultures. This piece also creates revulsion and humor by repeating a part of the human body. Her insistence on listing forges a fascinating counterpart to her representation of fertility, protection and nurturing. In order to create, she seems to imply, we must hear the voices of the works we beget. In taking organic elements out of context and repeating them in ways suggestive of other organic forms, this work walks the line between figuration and conceptual practice with unusual certainty. She offers us an unusually deft rendering informed by biography but not dependant upon it for legibility.
Sarah Brewer.