Sarah Louise Davey’s Grotesque Menagerie

These disturbing and grotesquely beautiful sculptures by Sarah Louise Davey are made of vividly, violently, luridly, fantastically painted ceramic, embodying creatures with bold, tortured, glazed stares, and strange growths either covering their eyes or framing them like sick, rotted petals of flesh carved out around an astonishingly open iris. The effect is unnerving and startling, garish and obscene, yet whimsical and lovely. The pieces appear simultaneously textured and not, curiously both three- and two-dimensional – looking like paintings on porcelain – and the bold, dark lines sketching their features out against the chalky whiteness of the ceramic “flesh” hold a horrific and fascinating quality.