Phillip Lai: Drunken Sailor

‘Drunken Sailor' consists of a group of new sculptures both wall-based and floor-based that cross-reference each other across the spaces of the gallery. Their colour palette is limited to mostly blue and silver, but made with a range of materials including poured concrete, pewter, polyurethane resin, aluminum, and tarpaulin. Much of the work explores a sense of retention and loss of physical material. Within these lengthy processes, positive and negative spaces are sometimes muddled, using the reversing logic of casting; nothing is quite what it first seems. 

Since the early 1990s, Phillip Lai has been working with sculpture to develop a visual language that enables a certain kind of thinking about abstraction and specificity in the ubiquitous objects and material that much of human life depends upon for sustenance and survival. Containers – plates, sinks, bowls, or barrels – the receptacles that typically carry raw materials or food, repeatedly appear in Lai’s sculptures, often alongside other motifs, such as cloth - in the form of jute, clothing, tarpaulin - layers utilized to provide protection, shelter or warmth.  Lai works within a language of these foundational formal motifs to consider how visual and conceptual attention is structured in daily life.

These are big topics. In Greek "topos" means place, and indeed Lai provides a place for a global discussion to be had, yet on the scene his pieces set, that is, in the key of the precise material language they employ. This place is no parliament, courtroom, or medical theatre built for the universal representation of this or that. Neither is it imbued with the air of authority stately architecture invokes to instill belief in the permanence of rule. Instead, the topography Lai's pieces lay out is one of places where people put up dwellings, but it’s unclear whether they do so to stay for long, or move on to a different site where labour, water and other resources might exist. Objects take the lead where structures become impermanent. Existential improvisers rely on things that work. Be it simple tools that are still ready to hand when you’re nowhere near infrastructure. Be it bespoke instruments which you take with you wherever you go because the craft needed for their making outlasted centuries, and so they speak of survival, like a talisman of know-how passed on for generations. Either way, the objects may testify to what is at stake in the struggles in place. Unlike evening news or twitter feeds, however, Lai's work does not talk of these struggles in the fashion of reports on current events. His pieces speak in the more silent tone of embodied witness accounts. Their material make-up, as it were, keeps the score.