Entering the Kentish Town of Faversham where Jeff Lowe lives and works and sandwiched between the cavernous blue and yellow Aldi superstore and disgusting purple Premier Inn is an extraordinary thing. Perched above the new “traffic calming”roundabout is something squat, rusting and solid. Something real amongst the plastic nullity. Something real like the actual town itself, unlike the “could be anywhere” brands and non-architecture of the early 21st century that says nothing of the town or people who like Jeff, live and work there.
Jeff Lowes sculpture is a rebuke to everything fake or false. It is true to itself and nothing else. It makes no bow to the previous. No tribute to before. No homage to his predecessors. References are spurious. Its a sculpture that really could only be made today yet somehow it “feels” oddly ancient.
Lowe loves the texture of stuff. The sense of the material. The woof and weft of steel. And like weaving or knitting he has plaited it, cross-stitched it, bent and stretched it or simply erected giant walls of the stuff and threaded lines down it. Like you’re looking at a vertical aerial photograph of the fields far below you. Or when he used to contort cross-stitched meshed grids into improbability. And you think “why did he do that”? And the fabulous answer of course is “cos he felt like it”. Felt!
These days like the roundrel that welcomes you to his hometown he bends huge curvilinear slabs of steel into vast circles of inter-locking spirals punctured with organic shaped cuts that make the huge tonnage airy and light like…like steel bubblewrap I suppose.
He’s playing of course. Having fun with ideas of solidity, weight, heft, mass. How do you make all of that disappear with a material that is defined by its very mass? We’ve seen it often enough in architecture and engineering - the great famous Victorian bridges that seem to float over their spanned spaces beneath them. But that’s a trick of space. Do them small scale and they appear inelegantly lumpen like the standard rail crossings dotted about. Maybe his pieces are more in the mode of contemporary architecture like a Gehry or Liebeskind structure. But that won’t do either. For again these are edifices of size where vast occupied space overwhelms with its design. Jeff doesn’t do “design”. Nothing happens on a drawing board. Steel is bent, cut, pierced, pounded, painted, riveted as it is happening, as it feels like it needs to be at the precise moment of doing. It is not pre-planned it is instinctive, intuitive, felt. Felt! …It needs to be and then it is.
I suppose we could waffle on about his Northern roots - shipyards, big steel, Newcastles famous bridge reproduced to span Sydney harbour and whether all that was imbibed in the tiny consciousness and serendipities of childhood. Who knows? Why does he like them rusty? Who cares? We could, I suppose, bang on about them being a sort of metallic memento mori. The awful acknowledgement of increasing age and the inevitable. The gleaming, the dulling, the rusting, the end. And that might just fly in some pretentious and spurious art-bollox dinner conversation or wanky art mag. But in truth it’s probably just cos steel rusts and Jeff loves steel. And like him, rust never sleeps.
Why I love swinging into the town I share with Jeff is because I smile when I see his civilised sculpture towered over but towering above the ugly gods of the everyday. Those gods that the deluded burghers of the borough believe is a boon to modernity when they are no more than an obeisance to commercial vulgarity. And so amongst the glare of strip-lighting and branding here is this thing…how do you describe it.? What is it anyway? It is Art.
Unlike the commercial desert about it, It is born of feeling, of a sense, it is not mass anything it is individual, It is deeply human. It makes you wonder, question and smile. Or it makes you wonder how much it cost or get annoyed, or wonder who did it and why. It welcomes you to our town. And it is by Jeff Lowe.
Bob Geldof, 14/04/2022
