Sadie Hennessy: Riffing on Englishness

Touring the by-ways of the interwebtubes (in this case in search of chocolate elephants) I became distracted by an image of classic gallows wit, Sadie Hennessy's stick of seaside rock with 'Gary Glitter' apparently printed through it. Part of her Strange Hungers exhibition, it has that lovely uncomfortable combination of being clever and dirty, funny and nasty. The press release for the exhibition states that she:

creates hybrid objects & images which are both comfortably familiar and deeply unsettling. She operates within a cultural framework of ‘Englishness’ and explores the idea of nostalgia, and more pertinently, the construct of ‘faux nostalgia’ i.e. the yearning for a time that never actually existed.

 Modified found objects are transformed into provocative artifacts whose meanings are formed from their cultural resonances within English 'low' culture, its language and referents. As such, these objects take on a political inference in which their humour, formed of incongruity or ironic juxtaposition, is central.

In other words, she is able to say something serious precisely because she can make the viewer laugh.