The Royal Box

"The 'Royal Box' (1992), which was first shown in Nottingham at the Angel Row Gallery, is the antithesis of the 'Steam Installation'. Whereas the vapour is warm, moist, volatile, expansive and open to view but not physcially accessible, this sculpture is an enclosed vault- cold, dry, sterile and inert. If you venture between the heavy plastic strips that protect the doorway you find yourself in a a nine foot square refrigeration unit kept at a temperature of minus 23 degrees centigrade. One's physical displeasure at being confined in a cold space in increased by the awarness that if you become trapped inside, at this temperature you would die.

"It might be a pleasantly langorous end - as she worked on the piece the artist found that she gradually sank into a dreamy, hallucinatory state - but fear of incarceration is nevertheless likely to give rise to anxiety and claustrophobia. The wafting steam seduces with its sensuous womb-like plentitude, but this inhospitable container unnerves with thoughts of freezers, mortuaries and even gas chambers. Inside one encounters a U-shaped wall of ice cubes: beautiful, crystaline, pure and deadly. If you give yourself up to embrace of this narrow enclosure, you feel the heat being drawn out of your body. It's as though you were lying in state in your own mausoleum: a witness to your own demise." (S.Kent, 'Young British Artists II', London 1993, unpaged.)