aly aitken – SCULPTOR

 

 

ALY AITKEN

I                      know this woman who is a conjurer of the Romantic and the chimerical though she would not claim this. Aly Aitken possesses herculean spine to make art which is at once hallucinatory, beguiling, menacing, puzzling, and filled with the wild imaginings of a child’s playground. I am roused by this woman who sits (I imagine romantically) hand, heart and hammer to the grindstone in a cobbled hollow of Melbourne’s CBD. 

I have eaten at her communal table, drunk and laughed in the warm crucible she inhabits with her family and lost my breath speechless at her vignettes of Kitsch, Karma and Madonna relics. Aly lives in a Wonderland. Festooned with repositories of marbles that once scratched gritty streets, curiously primped dolls that capture your attention, Madonna reliquaries and taxidermies mesh unapologetically with domesticity you begin the see the antecedents of where her art germinates. Where her quizzical forms begin and trail into vagary. She is at once the clothier, mage and sculptor of her sweep that clutches in its grips, fish eye apertures of the cinereal city sky line.

Her hand stitched leather menaces, sit, stand and writhe for their salvation. I’m not sure I know what they want or of what they speak, but I have seen their faces before-in that realm where only children dare go. Aly’s sculptures go in advance of rational definition as they morph beyond what is known and experienced. But one has only to close their eyes to see the pages of disremembered fairy tales of the lusus naturae in Aly’s work. She is a storyteller that crafts the dark creatural full of wonderment and metamorphosis.

I am a reader of fairy tales, poems and songs and as these follow their own logic so do I find meaning in between the lines of Alyson Aitken’s sculpture. Whether you are a first hand witness or art voyeur, Aly invites you into her world.

Stephanie Margaritidis