Frozen Game is the
game I’m
planing
~ AA
coffer ups
>Just liming the in de to
cardbeand
LITERAT
Sher
netting expose
-motionless
ructes
fixed stale for a
period
For Frozen Game, Georgia Dickie shipped twenty boxes from her studio in Toronto to London. Each of these cardboard cartons contains a sculptural assemblage of material, scavenged detritus found in the snowdrifts and puddles of her local streets, temporarily immortalised in polluted ice until their rediscovery and revitalisation in Dickie’s work. While continuing an ongoing practice in seeking out otherwise discarded materials for her constructions, more recently, the journey between home and studio has narrowed the patterns in Dickie’s collecting of objects, thereby shaping the scale and content of this new, more intimate body of work.
While each sculpture might shift and change by chance during shipping, this only happens within the limits of a deliberately controlled system. Though the boxes are vessels, they don’t merely contain the works’ content, they are the content. Alongside these wall-based works, innumerable discarded paper coffee cups cover a central plinth in the gallery, with no more distance from the floor than a pavement curb. Dickie’s obsessive fascination with lowest rung materials, the gross bits that get caught in street crevices and sidewalk edging stemmed from an urge to create something self-contained. Often appearing precarious in their assembly, in these works the artist focuses on smaller, intricate fragments of material information, affixing matter to each cup and inside each box. In Frozen Game, Dickie considers our subjective choices, the value-based decisions we make in collecting and discarding items, in order to tease out a reflection and reconsideration of how we experience our material surroundings.