Space: Long Gallery, ongoing
 
 
In Roxy Walsh's work the penis is often a proxy, a foil for fluidity and equivocation, becoming and undoing, for desire and it's spending. Initially a player in a sensual, consensual, fecund economy, the penis has grown into a little Robinson out in the world: sprouting and dividing, mirroring and masquerading. Like the individuated nose of Gogol, sometimes reluctant to allow kinship with the body that spawned him.
 
 
For connecting Principle, Walsh has returned to the image of Daphne in transformation, but unlike in previous installations* here she will allow the audience to decide her eventual shape. Along with Andrew Burton the audience is invited to add to drawings that she will begin before leaving for a workshop in New York.
 

Before her prayer was ended, torpor seized
on all her body, and a thin bark closed
around her gentle bosom, and her hair
became as moving leaves; her arms were changed
to waving branches, and her active feet
as clinging roots were fastened to the ground--
her face was hidden with encircling leaves.--
Phoebus admired and loved the graceful tree,
(For still, though changed, her slender form remained)
and with his right hand lingering on the trunk
he felt her bosom throbbing in the bark.
He clung to trunk and branch as though to twine.
His form with hers, and fondly kissed the wood
that shrank from every kiss. *

Ovid
Metamorphosis, Apollo and Daphne

*Annika Sundvik Gallery, New York: Temple Bar Gallery, Dublin:
Bluecoat, Liverpool, Globe Gallery, North Shields