Clementine Keith-Roach
Clementine Keith-Roach
earth mirrored sky mirrored earth, 2023
plaster, wood, resin-clay, gouache paint
31 7/8 x 51 1/8 x 42 1/2 ins.
P·P·O·W and Ben Hunter are pleased to present works by Clementine Keith-Roach (b. 1984) at Art Basel Parcours, curated by Stefanie Hessler, Director of the Swiss Institute, New York. Fusing the corporeal, decorative, historical, and functional, Keith-Roach creates detailed, uncanny sculptures that blur boundaries between object and figure. The artist’s works often appear both as archaeological artifacts in a state of semi-ruin and as ruins-in-reverse — statues in the process of creation, their cultural significance yet to be ascribed by a society still to emerge. Keith-Roach’s installation at Art Basel Parcours includes a largescale, freestanding sarcophagus and wall-hung relief fragments. An imposing structure, earth mirrored sky mirrored earth, 2023, is cast in plaster and trompe l’oeil painted to appear as a continuous terracotta surface. This funerary monument is not for a single person but for humanity’s collective body and invites viewers to contemplate our historical present and perilous future.
Earth mirrored sky mirrored earth was first presented in Earth Sky Body Ruins, a two-person exhibition with Christopher Page, at Ben Hunter, London, in 2023. In the accompanying catalog essay co-authored by Keith-Roach and Page, the sculpture is described as follows:
“The sarcophagus, entitled earth mirrored sky mirrored earth, is my first freestanding sculpture that is not born of a found vessel, but an entirely new vessel-form built up of a plethora of found things. This new vessel-form is offered as a sarcophagus, not for a single human body, but for this world – a brick-clad funerary monument to societal grieving. Held aloft by ruined caryatids at its corners, its exterior is encrusted with the material excesses of contemporary life: car parts scavenged from scrap yards, discarded toys, crumpled plastics, objects accumulated over my life, a dummy, a dildo. Amidst the crush are body parts – children’s hands, adults’ hands, clutching, caressing. At once tender and toxic, this writhing surface is reminiscent of both an ornate Roman sarcophagus and compacted landfill. The ‘brick’ interior is resolutely empty, an ominous nothing circumscribed by everything. A sarcophagus made of the waste of consumer culture and ruined bodies might, on first blush, sound like a sculpture without hope. But for me this is a work of spolia, an ancient architectural practice that take the ruins (spoils) of older buildings – older works – to create new ones. As early Christians (somewhat violently) repurposed pagan columns, sculptures and masonry to build churches, so I (somewhat hopefully) build new forms out of the ruins of this world. After all, sarcophagi were never simply coffins but portals to the next world.”
Clementine Keith-Roach, 2023.
Clementine Keith-Roach received a BA in Art History from University of Bristol, UK and now lives and works in Dorset, UK. She has exhibited at Ben Hunter Gallery, London, UK; MOCA, Los Angeles, CA; Blue Projects, London, UK; Centre Regional D’art Contemporain (CRAC), Sète, France; Villa Lontana, Rome, Italy; Open Space Contemporary, London, UK; Pervilion, Palermo, Italy and London, UK; Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University, Ithaca, NY; Wellcome Collection, London, UK; and Kasmin, New York, NY; among others. She is an editor of Effects, a journal of art, poetry and essays. Keith-Roach’s work was featured on the cover of Art in America’s September 2022 issue. Recent solo exhibitions include New statue at P·P·O·W, New York, NY, in Fall 2024, and Nothing that has ever happened is lost at Ben Hunter Gallery, London, UK, in Spring 2025.
Parcours is Art Basel’s unique sector, dedicated to site-specific installations, sculptures, interventions, and performances situated in public spaces and historic locations within the close vicinity of Art Basel. Curated for the second time by Stefanie Hessler, Art Basel’s public art sector unfolds along Clarastrasse up to the Middle Bridge, with an installation on Münsterplatz.
Parcours is free to the public.
Galleries showing at the fair are responding to a shifting art market.