Bronze Age Gold from Wales

DE MONCHAUX, Cathy (English sculptor who studied at Camberwell School of Art (1980-83) and Goldsmiths' College (1985-7). From the mid-1980s she made exquisite and intricate sculptures, at once seductive and grotesquely threatening. In the late 1980s her work carried an atmosphere of erotic restraint; Trace (1990), was made by distending and bolting together metal strips to create brassiere-like structures. The latent sexual threat of her objects was often underscored in the early 1990s by provocative titles such as Defying Death I Ran Away to the Fucking Circus (1991), and Once Upon a Fuck (1992). Throughout this decade her work became more subtly seductive, early contrasts of red velvet and steel were exchanged for a faded, more ornamental aesthetic. From 1994 her work also became larger, more pictorial, often wall-mounted. There is a sense of anxiety present in much of her work: this was a strong element of her 1998 Turner Prize exhibition, for example the large floor sculpture Never Forget the Power of Tears (1997.); twelve sepulchral lead slabs positioned around a long central spine-like construction, redolent of a bizarre carnivorous plant or a sprung trap, evoked a disturbing and violent morbidity. Themes of eroticism and death were also developed in small wall-mounted works, often made in sets. Trust Your Sanity to No-one (1994) showed a large green jewel set in a fleshy mass, stretched and battened like a trophy to a sharp metal frame.)