English identity is a fractured, fragmented thing in Jamie Fitzpatrick’s new show. Through gooey animatronic sculptures, sound and paintings, he allows mythical figures of English folk history to be torn apart by packs of dogs, to become dismembered and beheaded. These are the bloodied remains of a nation.
The three main sculptures show woodwoses, folkloric wild men once thought to prowl the forests, here all modelled on the artist himself with long, curly, Charles II-style bouffant hair. In one, black dogs tear at his flesh, in another he stands over a slain dragon, in the last he lounges with hares. The sculptures' mouths move, singing songs and telling tales of Bishops Stortford and Watford, the hidden histories of the home counties. The dogs could represent death, the devil, depression; the dragon could be a threat to the working people of England; the hares might be madness and mental health. It’s all rammed full of bucolic English mythology and symbolism, but none of it holds together, it all falls apart.
Fitzpatrick’s England is a place crumbling with poverty, collapsing under the weight of its heavy history, a land of Brexit and recession and misery and rolling hills and supermarket own-brands and feasts and food banks.
It’s brilliant sculpture: gross, monolithic, surreal, angry, despondent. It might be a miserable and uncomfortable shell of its former self, but this is England.