Mark Handforth ‘A Scarlet Forest’

‘Buzzing orange tubular lines, balanced precariously upright, duplicate, and extend in all directions. Vibrant, because they’re alive, humming with life, electrified.

A small human among a-priori life forms; and the Forest a sense of endlessness, of an endless inevitable sculpture. Each electric noodle might be a version of the one before and a model for the one after; oftentimes changing with just the slightest of undulation-variation, sometimes gregariously looping and reaching.

By the daylight-roof-light glow of the Aird’s Lane gallery, seventeen outdoor sculptures form an interior landscape, a strange grove growing in a white walled garden. Bold, basic cylindrical forms root deeply to the ground even as their luminous colour vibrates in space; connected and apart.’
Mark Handforth, 2022

A new body of work by Mark Handforth will be exhibited at Aird’s Lane, a sea of pipes, contorted sculptural limbs simultaneously exist as individual pieces as well as being a part of a bigger site reactive installation. With soft creases in the aluminium, the works have a malleability, personified with the use of folds in the material. Light and its immaterial aspects are frequently used as a medium in Handforth’s works, emphasising the contrast in weight between it and the other materials they are comprised of and significantly altering our perception of them.

Using a florescent orange paint that is usually used for sailing yachts, Handforth references his love of the sea and the continual reference to urban city scape of his home in Miami.

Mark Handforth’s (b. 1969 in Hong Kong, lives and works in Miami, Florida) works has been exhibited in exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Whitney Museum of American Art (NY), Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (Washington, DC), Dallas Museum of Art, the Hammer Museum (Los Angeles), Art Institute of Chicago, Kunsthaus, (Zurich), Le Consortium (Dijon) Gavin Brown’s enterprise (NY), Modern Institute (Glasgow), and New York’s Central Park, among others.