Anna John’s practice spans sculpture, ceramics, sound and installation, with works that open a dialogue by scrutinising universal notions of value, time and labour. John’s sculptural line of inquiry is based in an effort to rethink and reorganise hierarchies fuelled by the concepts of support and containment, leading to the potential of objects that are never concluded, always in flux, charged with movement and rhythm. They ask what it is to make, to place and to see. The exhibition becomes a space of play – the studio a site
of performance.

Foie Gras (2016) uses the common device of the garden arch as a departure point into the potentialities and proliferations that structures of support can offer when axes shift and hierarchies are undermined. Studio detritus and found objects are both framed within, and support, the toppled monument. 

Referencing the luxury food product and French cultural hallmark of duck liver pate, produced by the painful and cruel force-feeding of animals, the work attempts to display the inner workings of the well-oiled machine of sculpture and its history, subtly thwarting its expectations.