Thataway

As playful with the plasticity of language as with clay, Nagle’s love of simple, sometimes crude, humour is solidified in ‘Thataway’ — a harmony of confusion and misdirection as two fingers point to two opposite directions. The unnatural effect of the blushing, tinted colours further accentuates a creeping sense of ambiguity. The primal, earthly state of clay is further devolved by the sculpture’s true model; dog droppings — and the piece subtly consecrates the waste, the ability for art to veil and make sacred any object of any origin through formalism, and becomes a joke token of the relationship between animal and doting owner happy to pick up after it.