Mark Woods: A Return to Old Certainties

Mark Woods produces highly elaborated artefacts that blurs the boundaries between top end jewellery, fine arts and items from a cabinet of curiosities ending in luxurious objects of desire. As unnerving as evocative, the viewer is confronted with exquisite beauty, sophisticated craftsmanship and the awakening of unexpected emotions. That is the power of Woods’ works: an invitation to step out from our comfort zone and a requestioning of the human desires. As the art critic, Mónica Sánchez-Argilés, says: “Woods’ sculptures seem to echo to perfection the fraudulent simulation phenomena of a society increasingly obsessed with glamour and pornography”.

Vanya Balogh, the curator and also an artist, says: “A Return To The Old Certainties is that rare thing; an exhibition that brings us a renewed encounter between psychoanalysis and fine art. At once disciplined and productively wayward, Mark Woods work dialectic directs us toward compelling voyeuristic world that awakens and invites us intimately to his fine making skills, love, curiosity, perversion, aggression, impurity and much more, ultimately all devised and compellingly so for an artist himself to unbecome accomplice in that ritual of repetitive abandonment.”