Reviews, Press
Publications

Mere Jelly Catalogue Introduction. 2004.

Paul Frank Lewthwaite makes sculptures that make a fragmented poetic rather than coherent practical sense. Timber boxes open to reveal spray-painted MDF flat packs for the construction of not domestic shelves or furniture but what the artist calls "motifs of fragmentation". Ship for the Sinking is a steel kit for a sea-going suicide. A Place of Blindness is a steel model house spray painted black with plywood boarded-up windows. Three Diaries: Hopes, Dreams, Desires is a set of three steel diary-sized locked safes. The mystifying strength of Lewthwaite's work lies in its half-resemblance to quite ordinary things. Often made from DIY materials, these constructions look like they should be of some use, yet like a DIY joke, their use escapes us. A recent series of even more mysterious plywood sculptures were based on a combination of drawings done at Madrid's Museo Arqueologico Nacional and reproductions taken from The War Illustrated publications 1940-1946. These are plywood semi-abstracts but again take on the significance of skeletal relics or fossilised remains. Then again they could be bits of furniture gone weird, furnishings from a DIY nightmare. Lewthwaite's mock-domestic sculptures bring home the fact that an artwork is an immaculately crafted object that is of absolutely no use to anyone other than being its own deeply suggestive self.