Jane Wilbraham’s sycamore carvings are the product of great labour – channelling the ancient craft of scrimshaw or the amateur hobbyist who whiles away hours on painted warriors or cross-stitching. While this aspect of her sculptures – their unyielding time-consumption – is rich, they lack conceptual clout.
Wilbraham here whittles the wood, often used to make kitchen tools, into finely chiselled assemblages. Neat watercolours of natural materials – molluscs, leaves and charcoal – accompany wooden feathers, fingers, coins and chains. At her most interesting, she arranges bent wooden coins (bent money) into the crease of a blue handkerchief, forming a line on one side and leaving them scattered on the other. Childhood thoughts of scavenging are here coupled with a more adult, domestic satisfaction.
While Wilbraham’s works produce these sorts of poetic effects, their political inferences remain muddied. It’s suggested that they articulate a rebellious agenda – one of ‘class uprisings’ and ‘the human consequences of the overwhelming power of capital’. Small textual inclusions nod to an adopted heritage of concrete poetry, a medium historically taken up with the aim of providing a scathing commentary on militarism. It’s clear that the artist has slowed the activity of making with the intention of marrying material and intellectual processes in her practice, but it is difficult to deduce Wilbraham’s motive with regards to contemporary dissidence.