The consistently excellent Paradise Row’s new exhibition features Douglas White’s Elephant Totem Song inspired from a poem of the same name by Ted Hughes. Consisting of parts of a single felled Beech tree, White explores the branches and the roots, the up and the down, the large and the small of his material.

Immediately the subject matter evokes earthiness, the occult growth of root systems unearthed into light, separated tenderly from the gravity of their soil. Yet rarely has subject matter and material been put together so lyrically, so harmoniously.

I remember reading Ted Hughes’ commentary of the to my mind superior poet Sylvia Plath. He said, she took a pragmatic approach to her work; if she couldn’t get a wardrobe out of a poem she was happy with a bedside table.  Well whether White started out to get an elephant or began with the idea to produce sculpture from a single beech tree and the elephant suggested itself, demanded itself is another matter – but unmistakably White has captured a quintessential ‘elephantness’ here. Powerfully resonant, the intricate and painstakingly dug up roots act like bonsai branches, stripped bare by some African drought. In reality though they suggest the long forgotten promise of water. A furtive searching for sustenance. There is an unmistakable lineage from tendril, root, trunk and branch to elephant, from flora to fauna to human cultural interactions with all of the above.

(more…)