Daniel Shipp, When karma kicks in, 2022, pigment print on Hahnemühle German Etching paper, varying sizes.
For Daniel Shipp’s latest body of work Chroma Tales, Soda Arts Founder and Director Danielle Robson was commissioned to write a curatorial essay and facilitate an artist’s talk at the exhibition opening in Shipp’s studio on 3 November 2022.
Read the full essay below:
Daniel Shipp: Chroma Tales
What remains when glory fades? And what endures when accolades so fiercely pursued no longer carry significance?
In his new series Chroma Tales, Daniel Shipp has rescued unwanted mementoes from sporting triumphs and cast them in a tableau of theatric performance.
With the sporting elements jettisoned - soccer balls, tennis racquets and hockey sticks, for example - the figures in these trophies transcend the competitive binary of winning and losing and instead tap into something more human. Shipp co-opts pinnacle moments of performance to instead tell intimate stories of human experience. When the Switch Flicks; When You Should Only Look Forward; When Karma Kicks In: each work’s title evokes a critical moment that speaks to the viewer’s own life journey.
Chroma Tales continues Shipp’s interest in working with discarded objects eking out a post-heyday existence between glory and landfill. To create this particular series, Shipp placed a call-out on social media for donations of unwanted trophies. After grinding off the sporting equipment from the figures, Shipp began the meticulous and labour-intensive process of crafting intricate vignettes in his studio.
What is immediately apparent when looking at these works is the drama and theatrics of the trophy poses. Without her ball and racquet, the tennis player appears to be pleading with the sky. Instead of crouching for a winning kick, soccer players are caught in a moment of group gesture and swing. And the netball players poised to shoot a goal become, depending on your point of view, either revellers or protestors cheering the group on.
It will come as no surprise that 1930s musical theatre is an influence for this series, with the maximalism of Busby Berkleley’s choreography a key inspiration. The darkened silhouettes in the background of some of the works recall the simple block-like forms of mid-century Brutalist architecture, and create stage sets on which the action takes place. (Side note: these shapes are sporting trophies too.)
Creating moments of harmony and discord through colour is central to the artist’s practice. Nowhere is this more narratively on-point than in the triumphant When It’s Your Time in the Sun. Rose-gold colour saturates the winged heroine and her posse in the foreground. They are flanked by shadowy matte reflections, suggesting that something ominous is on the horizon. The electric colour palettes are reminiscent of glossy advertising images from the 1980s, a cultural reference that recurs throughout Shipp’s work. As noted by the artist, “We can talk about big, substantial ideas in reference to pop culture and advertising.”
A hallmark of Shipp’s works is that everything is assembled in his studio and captured in-camera. The subtle balance of colour of the trophies versus the backgrounds; the contrast of high gloss and matt tones; the reflections that are sometimes exact, and sometimes not. It’s a focused analogue creative process that can take days in the studio before a single image is produced.
And yet, there are elements that the artist cannot control. It is in that space – the tiny window between order and total chaos – that brilliance is produced.
Danielle Robson
Curator & Founder Soda Arts