Bringing together work produced over the past decade, Des Hughes: One Hand Washes the Other is the most comprehensive publication on the British artist's work to date. Des Hughes' work bears witness to an obsessive, physical enquiry into the materials, methods and traditions of sculpture, rethinking conventional scu lptural materials such as plaster,marble, bronze and clay. Nothing is as it first appears; crudely modelled clay is meticulously cast in resin but, with the inclusion of marble dust, it may appear to have been carved and polished from a block of stone or fashioned from a piece of chewing gum. Hughes also considers the purpose or meaning of sculpture-from the functional doorstop to the sacred effigy. Traditions are revised as he rethinks ecclesiastical equipment and relics as macabre joke-shop props or as modern, abstract sculptural forms (and vice versa). The traditional materials of sculpture are called into question and a robust sense of imagery recalls classic British horror.There is a tender acknowledgement of the twentieth-century modernist canon, while a pre-romantic and more medieval moment is reimagined, with a somber world view of the transience of life, the futility of pleasure and the certainty of death.
