No slacking here in a playful marriage of history and art

WETWANG Slack is an Iron Age chariot burial site in the Yorkshire Wolds. The New Zealand-born artist Francis Upritchard saw a quirky recreation of this pre-Roman world in Hull a couple of years ago and it appealed to her fascination with the language of display and the means through which we communicate history and culture.

Despite the difficulties the Curve can present for displays of small objects — its height, its length, its odd shape — Wetwang Slack is hugely enjoyable and beautifully paced. Upritchard views the show as a kind of “materials retrospective”, including the full gamut of her practice, from costumed figures made in painted polymer clay, through textiles, ceramics, glass and her experiments with a rare Brazilian rubber called balata. But almost everything here is new.

There’s much pleasure to be had in the playful but exquisite pots and glass objects here. And while the hats on display on elegant hanging cases are the most trifling works, they’re still full of bizarre flights of fancy.

But it’s in the displays of figures at either end of the Curve that the show is most powerful. Upritchard’s polymer clay figures draw on myriad references without fixing them. Throw in Upritchard’s delight in the absurd and the figures, entirely made by hand, are all the more powerful in their unknowability and preposterousness — they’re enigmas.

The balata figures feel like a giant leap in Upritchard’s work. From this strange material she has conjured lumpen centaurs gathering rocks ready to throw in battle and longlimbed figures in tangled gatherings. In these intimate groupings I found myself thinking not just of classical figures, but bogmen, animals in nature documentaries and posed family photographs. Upritchard’s rare ability is to make them both hilarious and touching.

⬤ Until Jan 6, 2019 barbican.org.uk)

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