KEN UNSWORTH
Vibrant and engaged in a daily studio practice at the age of eighty-seven, Ken Unsworth moves easily between the extremes of different mediums and concedes he is never completely satisfied with any of them. Mastery, he asserts, is not the point. As Beckett wrote so playfully and wisely: ‘Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.’
THE WORK OF KEN UNSWORTH IS OFTEN LABELLED as conceptual. His first public solo exhibit saw him pale, bare and pinioned to the wall in a series of performance works that fused the fragility of flesh to the geometric thrust of sculptural form.
Anthony Bond, in his new monograph on the artist, accurately points out that after being exposed to the theatrical work of Gilbert and George, the young sculptor from Victoria saw that the body itself was an expressive medium, an art material in its own right. He hoisted himself into the frame and that idea continues to reverberate subtly.
