By Gilbert Bouchard

At first glance, you’d think the three-member North Edmonton Sculpture Workshop was lazy in the naming of their Harcourt House exhibit in the gallery’s cosy front room.

The plainly titled “Front Room Sculpture” seems rather generic, but it’s actually making a statement about the process by which the work was created.

“We went out of our way to make sculpture specifically for this room, which is why we named it the way we did,” says Ryan McCourt.

Working within the confines of a small room dominated by a hulking reception desk and a large windowed wall led the sculptors to create works designed to hang on or relate directly to the space’s three available walls. This intimate approach is a departure for the practitioners, who usually work with larger-scale found-metal pieces.

“We needed to leave a much room as possible for people to get in the room and move about. The work also has to fit through the room’s doors, which was a concern for me,” the 27-year-old artist says of his diptych sculpture that “leans” on one of the room’s walls. “My piece will barely fit.”

The diminished size and scale proved to be an especially big stretch for Andrew French.

Normally, the 31-year-old sculptor makes huge works that tower about five metres high and as many metres around. The work currently up at Harcourt is made out of brass and averages a delicate 40 centimetres in height.

“The finished pieces (of French’s work on display at Harcourt) are much smaller than the components of the regular work I do. Not to mention the brass has a whole different vocabulary that the steel I usually sculpt.”

French’s small pieces boast recognizable household objects in their composition and are very domestically grounded, as is McCourt’s work, which he describes as an “altar-piece” with references to shelves and niches.

“You might even call it a big medicine cabinet.”

Also working in relief, and keeping his work to 40 centimetres in circumference, 26-year-old Mark Bellows is creating small-scale abstract work that makes indirect references to indigenous mask-making traditions in its shape and overall physical presence.

In the end, all three sculptors want this radical departure in their body of work to call attention to the intimate side of object-building that’s often overlooked in a city filled with monumental steel sculpture.

“Not all sculpture is large and hard to move,” concluded Bellows. “These pieces can be hung on a wall, and they do fit in an average house.”

Keepsakes of silver

While Mary Kavanagh’s “Coming to Writing or The Silver Drawings” in Harcourt’s main exhibit room also involves metal, the didactic piece is more installation-based in genre and postmodern in temperament than its sister show.

Working from a thousand-strong collection of silver household keepsakes, Kavanagh displays the prosaic objects on low-hung shelves on the gallery’s walls, over which she draws/varnishes large sweeping hieroglyph-like marks. The work includes a video documentation of the artist working in the gallery as part of her piece’s deconstruction of text production.

Describing her work as “gestural,” the Lethbridge-based artist is commenting on the various emotional, memory and cultural layers we build up around even the most simple possessions and most ordinary domestic acts.