Clementine Keith-Roach | Press: Nothing that has ever happened is lost

Installation Views / Press Release / Works

"A chronicler who recites events without distinguishing between major and minor ones acts in accordance with the following truth: nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost for history."

—Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History

Ben Hunter is pleased to announce an exhibition of new sculptures by Clementine Keith-Roach. These works build on the artist’s practice of merging found vessels with casts of body parts using paint to create impossible objects. Time, in her work, is out of joint: the vessels are antique, the body-casts are a snapshot of the present, and the paintwork blurs these temporalities together. They are a strange variant of polychrome sculpture, in which material erosion becomes a kind of impressionist painting. The exhibition comprises six new sculptures that intensify Keith-Roach’s formal language. Hands and arms rush around the vessels, grabbing and dissolving into one another with a new urgency. Each work is a temporal knot that manifests the artist’s persistent interrogation into history and memory, both personal and collective. The title of the exhibition draws from Walter Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History, a text that enjoins us to imagine history differently from how the victors have written it. Keith-Roach answers Benjamin’s call, imagining an immense unwritten archive of care, toil, touch, gesture. The hands that move along these sculptures—holding, caressing, grabbing, reaching—stand in for the countless anonymous hands that move history, whose labour, while scarcely recorded, is never lost. 

"Like sexual desire, memory never stops. It pairs the dead with the living, real with imaginary beings, dreams with history."

—Annie Ernaux, The Years