Combining Surrealism, Dada & Pop Art, Fouts is best known for her distinctive sculptural works, which reconfigure commonplace objects & materials with a characteristically playful & provocative humour

Running from: Thu 12 Apr - Sat 12 May.

American-born artist Nancy Fouts' work brings together seemingly disconnected objects and ideas to revel in the inherent strangeness of the everyday. This upcoming exhibition addresses the recurring themes throughout Fouts’ work, such as time, nature, and religious iconography, and includes key pieces from the past decade, alongside new works on view for the first time.

Fouts describes her approach to gleaning ideas as “beachcombing”, rediscovering the familiar with a perspective that she likens to childhood naivety. For Fouts, the childlike viewpoint establishes found objects as playgrounds for invention, (in some cases incorporated as elements of a game such as Skittles Madonnas), unpicking the layers of meaning attributed to the common motifs of daily life and providing a sharp-witted, satirical view of the systems through which symbolic meanings and values are assigned.

This playful process of deconstruction often elicits surprise; in this exhibition, a blister pack of pills instead contains ladybirds (carefully preserved and re-painted), and a traditional policeman’s whistle reveals a glass eyeball inside the chamber. The function of the original object is also often reversed or subverted by the use of visual paradox, such as a thorn-encrusted walking stick that offers no support, or similarly, a prickly ‘Peacemaker’ gun, which cannot be fired without self-injury. Fouts describes these interventions as “tickling things up”, with the ethos that “wrong is nice” - a light-heartedness that barely conceals a darker side.