I’m sure there’s a comment to be made upon the fact that I had to drive out to Cambridge to see a solo installation by a Hamilton artist the likes of which I can’t imagine having ever happened in the city itself. But it’s Friday and a week before Christmas, so I’d rather be charitable and focus on the art itself: namely, Steve Mazza’s concise exhibition Unnatural Selection at Cambridge Galleries Preston.

Preston’s modest gallery space is well-suited to creating narratives between individual works, as demonstrated in Andrew McPhail’s use of the space last year. In this installation, Mazza’s work is anchored around the wryly-titled ‘Hopnopomp,’ a vaguely threatening welded structure that Mazza created in collaboration with Dave Hind.

‘Hopnopomp’ shelters one of Mazza’s kiln fired clay bunnymen in an usually vulnerable aspect. The fetal curl of the nude body is peaceful, but the backward twist of an arm reads as a somewhat restless gesture, like his sleep is disturbed in the tangled fairytale wood mimicked by the rusted brambles of steel, or else the subsuming weight of an industrial complex - the two worlds are uncomfortably conflated in Mazza’s visual language.

The muted palette of the installation represents another departure in Mazza’s practice; where many of his previous sculptures are brightly painted, Unnatural Selection is all dream-white and rust. Some of the trademark humour is preserved in the rounded, cartoonish figuration, but the bunny ears present a question rather than the punchline of a joke. Mazza’s use of the bunny-man hybrid as an analogue to the modern worker raises somewhat crass thoughts of rapid reproduction via “fucking like rabbits,” referencing a factory mentality that is subverted by the handcrafted patience of each of Mazza’s sculptures. The three posed in relation to plinths constructed as diving platforms make their individuality clear as a sequence of three conditions of the ambitious worker - of anticipation, success and failure. They are one and three figures at the same time.

The bunnyman who - at least in this suspended present - achieves flight creates a visual link with other works in the installation that thrive on an implied weightlessness that is subverted in part by the materiality of Mazza’s clouds. Unlike the finely-worked surfaces of his figures, his clouds are clotted with impurities that add to their visual weight. These dream-like clouds are thick, heavy, distinctly Hamiltonian.

Counter to this density, small paper birds escaping another smoggy cloud enact a sensitive return to the fragile quality depicted in the clay figures. Suspended at the ends of wires that mark a material trace of flight in the air, the birds tremble by some unseen force, balanced at a precarious point between worlds.

Unnatural Selection continues at Cambridge Galleries Preston until January 10, 2010.

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