Joseph Goddard

Heritage

Joseph Goddard’s latest sculptural project, Heritage, creates an intersection between urbanism, abstraction and expressionism.   

 The works act as an uprooting of artefacts forged in the former modernist era. Fragments suggestive of monumentality indicate a duality of process and the passing of time, as hyperactive unfiltered consciousness is scrawled on to the surfaces of slow glacial structures. Displaced, relocated into the now and displayed in armatures, the work stimulates questions regarding the effects and functions of post-war relics, provoking an ambivalence of protection, warning, veneration and restraint.   

“My work is responsive to early memories of encountering big cities; the feeling of stepping into a set, one filled with props and constructs; testaments to the grand visions of their makers and their unwieldly doctrines. Ever since then the urban-scape has never failed to offer moments and objects of real presence.

Cities are arenas of competing ambitions and ideologies. Dialogues exist between structures, materials and gestures, echoing from the past, permeating the present and encroaching into the future.  There are times and encounters which, although are happenstance, just feel too designed, they radiate aura and emanate the spirit of art. At these times it feels as if the environment’s sole function is to operate as an art object, it instils within me a desire to fuse, sculpt, atomise and capture these forms and their associations at will.”  

 In dealing with the familiar-made-incongruous, Heritage foregrounds notions of legacy, preservation, ruination, functionality and fragility, whilst playing across the rift of modern art practices.