Dean Hughes selected by Stacy Boldrick (2010)

Stacy Boldrick of the Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh profiles the work of Dean Hughes

Dean Hughes makes work out of familiar things: A4 paper, pins, thread, staples, backing card, paper bags, cardboard tubes, and felt tip pens. Hughes makes work that registers as an object in space with properties and values that elicit a phenomenologically-charged viewing experience. Understandably, discourse about his work frequently references the work of artists such as Tom Friedman, Sol Lewitt and Richard Tuttle, and occasionally invokes the dynamic of the modern office environment full of office supplies (see also, Martin Herbert's text on the artist in Vitamin D: New Perspectives in Drawing).

Beyond taxonomical and contextual approaches, it is critical to address Hughes’s long-term, consistent relationship with these everyday objects, as ordinary things overlooked due to their ubiquitousness. ‘I side with things, and not with materials’, he has said; ‘Functional objects express themselves, not me’ (Dean Hughes, contribution to Dysfunctional Objects seminar at The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, 20 March 2009). It makes sense, then, that Hughes should make unorthodox serial works. Hole punch pieces (often made with A4 paper), works made out of A4 paper (sometimes involving staples), staples, paper bags and backing card: all works transgress their place in any series because several series incorporate some of the same objects.

Many of his works operate like drawings and at the same time can also be described as the thinnest possible sculptures. In his Hole Punch pieces, the effect of the punched surface is both spatial and linear. A punched hole may be reinserted into the hole ('Hole Punch Discs Slotted through Paper', 2001), or the paper may be pierced several times and folded ('Folded Hole Punch Piece', 2006); the hole may be left as a hole, as in 'Hole Punch Piece' (2000), where a hole has been punched through the centre of a piece of A4 paper.

Hughes also uses A4 paper in his Pin Drawings, where thread and pin pairs suspend the paper through standard hole pairs, either independently or together ('Pin Drawing No. 2', 2006; 'Pin Drawing No. 20', 2007). Staples appear embedded in A4 paper ('Staples Pushed Up through Paper', 2005) and on a white plinth ('Bent Staples', 2006). Although each work is distinctly different, all of the work captures function through action – an action consisting of one event, one moment in time, or a series of events.

Most recently Hughes has made a series of micro-architectonic wall works incorporating small hole-punched boxes made from backing card and arranged in grid-like structures. In 'Boxes' (2008), a series of boxes is presented in equal and separate spaces, four rows of three columns; a work of the same title presents the boxes without a supporting structure, and a little precariously stacked. Seen together, the works may make associations with ideas about housing or democracy, but what is there is backing card and the possibilities of its function.

Hughes’s desire to understand what makes a thing a particular thing has a long history, dating back to Aristotle’s critique of Plato’s Ideal Forms. Later, in the 6th century, Boethius wrote ‘Even things which are believed to be inanimate also desire in a similar way that which is their own, don’t they? Otherwise why is flame carried upwards by its lightness and solid things carried down by their weight, except because these positions and motions suit the individual things?’ (Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, trans. V. E. Watts, Penguin, London, 1969, Book III, p.107).  In his work, Hughes pays careful attention to the positions and motions of everyday inanimate objects, making visible their otherwise invisible desires.

Stacy Boldrick, November 2009