Ant Hamlyn

Ant Hamlyn makes soft sculpture, hand-sewing flowers, fungi, succulents and carnivorous plants from velvet and polyurethane-coated fabrics and pressing them tightly behind Perspex or into glass jars. The botanical forms seem to lean into and push against their confines, caught mid-motion at the edge of a petal or a limb. Hamlyn sets opposites side by side: spiky and smooth, joyful and morbid, the garish colour of PVC against the softness of velvet, wooden cactus spines dulled behind a clear screen. The work deals with preservation and the human urge to hold on to things at their peak, and with how that pause makes the passing of time and the fragility of life felt all the more.