Elliot Fox: Psycho Geology

Anderson Contemporary, 3 - 17 December 2022

A pulse beats slowly through Psycho Geology, an exhibition of a series of aluminium boxes and reworked surfboards attached to the walls of Anderson Contemporary, Hackney Wick, with sound, and large screens full of diagrammatic and cryptic information that springs into action at the flash of a camera, as if catching a wave. There’s a laid-back, surfer’s rhythm to it.

It's hard to adjust to this rhythm in London’s strong current, where everyone moves around purposefully, trying to get to places. Surfing doesn’t really work like that: you go out and you come back in; it’s about the ride. The sculptures mirror this approach, aluminium faces calmly spray-painted a single colour, trees and bits of map attached sideways, gravity more lenient than usual; formally cyclical rather than directional, mellow to the point of muteness. For a certain kind of Londoner, here to extract a career and a bit of gratification before dashing off somewhere else, this mellowness verges too close to passivity; it’s almost an insult to come across something so unhurried.

Perhaps that’s the point. Elliot Fox’s sculptures bear such an imprint of Cornwall – surfing, defunct mines, raves in fields, megaliths, Celtic knots, knackered hand driers in pub toilets, crumbly parish churches, strange words – that they seem out of place here. Cornwall is somewhere you go to visit, and the familiar narrative is of second-home owners marginalising locals while providing their main source of income, retold in Mark Jenkin’s 2019 film Bait and again by the press during the lockdowns. Psycho Geology has a different take on this story.

It’s an unusual compound of a visit to and a visit from Cornwall. A text by curator Georgia Stephenson evokes a sense of its attraction, describing the fanciable old town of St Ives, an excursion down a tin mine and the resistance that the area offers to her, which takes the form of itchy grasses, booze, insects, the air, the sun, and mud. It’s psychogeography, half crackpot search for hidden truth, half holiday. Fox’s sculptures work the other way: they are less acquisitive (in fact, the surfboards and stickers lean into a surf shop aesthetic – they’re here to sell) and they seem not to search but rather to already know.

Town and Country and Alloyed Thinking (2022)

You could say that Fox has found a new market for authentic Cornish produce. But with the merchandising scalped off the provenance, the work restores to Cornwall its opacity, symbols of your holiday made strange and no longer yours: not threatening, but not exactly cosy either, models and miniatures and diagrams and charts intelligible only to those for whom they were made, but which lose none of their fascination, like standing stones.