Paddy Lamb, "Rapture of the Deserted, 2017
charcoal and wood, 90" x 114" x 24"
Alberta artist Paddy Lamb studied history at Trinity College in Dublin as a young man, and his love of the past has never left him. Now, a lifetime later, he is showing All Bones and Broken Treasures, poetic semi-abstract work that evokes the land and its stories.
These latest pieces, on view at Edmonton's Front Gallery until July 15, combine expressive drawing and painting with objects he has found out walking – animal skulls, bits of rusted farm machinery and the like.
For his sombre installation, Rapture of the Deserted, for instance, Lamb uses old pallets, painted black and topped by two weathered fence posts. Behind are three charcoal drawings of bits of machinery he picked up here and there. The work’s religious overtones can’t be ignored. The pallets are stacked to resemble an altar. And, of course, triptychs have a long history in Christian art, although they typically feature golden icons replete with the promise of a wondrous afterlife.
Lamb, who moved to Canada in 1985, says he was thinking about early settlers when he made the piece. “The formal traditions that they left behind in Europe probably would have included altarpieces and churches and things like that, and they would have been deprived of that in a way, but also forced to rely very heavily on pieces of equipment that were their livelihood, really. So I was just merging the two, in a way.”
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Paddy Lamb, "All Bones and Broken Treasures," 2017
installation view (detail showing "The More I Gather, the Less I Know, the More I Gather" at rear)
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Paddy Lamb, "The Growth of Privilege Reaches the Point of Prejudice," 2017
acrylic on fence casting, 51" x 69"
Lamb’s latest work grows out of an interest in how humans interact with the land, abandon various objects and otherwise manifest themselves on the environment. It also responds to Western society's current focus on whatever is new and large.
But Lamb doesn’t pretend to have any answers. Perhaps that’s best summed up by an eloquent series of 54 charcoal drawings, mounted in a grid. They show a vaguely circular object, bearing both organic and mechanical vibes, in various stages of deconstruction. The drawings could refer to a piece of machinery, or some sort of seedpod. The title? The More I Gather, the Less I Know, the More I Gather.
Paddy Lamb, "The More I Gather, the Less I Know, the More I Gather," 2015
charcoal and plywood, 72" x 108"
“It’s dangerous to ignore the incomplete, the obsolete, the less than perfect,” says Lamb. “I think there’s an infinite amount of creativity you could do around those things. And I suppose that relates very much back to other non-art aspects of how we’re dealing with technology, and how we’re dealing with the land and the environment.
“I guess I’m also struggling a little bit with a way to acknowledge the long, long history of humans on the land, the Indigenous. I’m not pretending to be clear about them, or anything, but I feel they’re important, and I have to give some sort of acknowledgement to them. Those are, I think, strong influences. And at times, I think there’s also this need to give meaning and colour to things that don’t necessarily have a finite meaning.”