Small Connecting Part

It’s exhibition number two in ‘International 3’s new compact Salford (UK) space and this time it’s a one woman affair: Hannah Dargavel-Leafe’s ‘Small Connecting Part’.

First the gripe. There’s too much stuff on display. Commercial pressures make obvious demands but Hannah Dargavel-Leafe’s combination of framed drawings, repeated girder motif wallpaper and sculptural ‘assemblages’ really require more space.

The small drawings look like exercises in carefully editing old-school technical drawings. Executed in pen, indian ink and pencil, these schematic abstractions of objects (a fluorescent light, a wine glass), an action (the skimming of stones on water) or the casual ripple of sound-waves (a yawn) are not quite images, not quite a traced motion, all encoded in the formal simplicity of a dry, pseudo-scientific shorthand. The obvious analogy is a musical score.

Actions petrified into abstractions and DNA templates for choreographing movement or sound, a musical score may be a formally simple thing but it’s implications are not: a compression of time and volume, intensity and delicacy, the featherlight insubstantial or an aggressively heavy slab of invisible weight. 

To further complicate things they are accompanied by four freestanding sculptural works, constructed from small hand sized ‘Crane Motifs’ each seated on roughly rectangular, slate thin slabs of cement set on  black metal frames looking like the supporting skeleton of a high stool from a corporate style bar

Far from being grotty little spit’n’glue maquette girder constructions they are well produced kinder-egg cute scaled down plastic architectural forms made solid by 3-D scan and print technology. 

They may hint at sculptural works so architecturally substantial that they escape the constraints of ‘art’ and directly impinge on the fabric of the social but they seem more indebted to Buckminster Fuller’s mathematical geometrical constructions than Manchester’s ’loft’ redevelopments.

The sculptures and drawings all forgo the pleasure of excessive detail but somehow all seem to insinuate an undergirding of psychological ennui.

Steven Gartside’s accompanying text quite reasonably notes that the drawings ‘ have a multiple existence, that of drawing, score, instruction, document: the choice helps to determine what might be made of the work.’ 

By strip mining chaos, editing the unpredictable - no matter how insignificant or even banal - Dargavel-Leafe leaves a directive thought as an elegant echo of the human need to organize, whether by architecture or ‘art.’

Indeed what is most telling is the viewer’s final interpretive choice, speaking volumes about the kind of art they need.