The Smallest Gallery in Soho presents ‘Cabbage Patch Kids’

The Smallest Gallery in Soho presents ‘Cabbage Patch Kids’, a site-specific installation exploring ecological urgency and capitalist exploitation by London-based interdisciplinary artist Molly Grad. This sculptural intervention in the heart of Soho combines natural and synthetic materials to present a fantastical vision for reconnecting with nature and with the creative impulse. The work forms part of an ongoing commitment to making the invisible visible.

Attempting to keep in line with the artist’s dystopian vision (see below), lighting approach is dramatic, theatrical, pin-spotlighting the protruding ‘cabbage heads’, beautiful and eery at the same time. The barren clay base picks up some of the light, aiding to its form and texture that constantly changes in appearance as the clay continues to change its shape, new cracks open and pieces fall away. Spotlights’ colour appearance varies depending on the cabbages’ fabric colour. Cool white light aids to spookiness, green tone filters enhance the richness of deep velvety greens, deep red brings out the violets.

At night, most of the spotlights are off and the scheme relies mainly on the uplight effect from the floor level. Lit from below, cabbage heads reveal themselves from a less familiar ‘unnatural’ viewpoint, magnificently unsettling in their lavish beauty.

For Grad, the story behind the Cabbage Patch Kids Toys, a soft-sculpture exhibited at arts and craft shows in the 1970s that became a mass-produced consumer product – offers an allegory for thinking about our increased detachment from what it means to create and a perceived erosion of social care.

‘Cabbage Patch Kids’ expands on Grad’s ongoing interest in excavating urban surfaces, metaphorically unearthing the city’s industrial past by creating an otherworldly space in which sculpted fabric cabbages, symbolising children, grow out of pure, clean soil, where “luminous blue ar-teries run through the leaves, pulsating to and from the earth source, nurturing it, making plant and human one” – Grad. This reparative gesture is disrupted by a dystopian vision: “for the final work, I imagine that the cabbages have been violently plucked from the earth and placed onto the ground, their budding bodies nestled in an unnatural clay-like soil which has become barren, stripped over centuries of its nutritional, nurturing traits” – Grad.

Photo credits: R. Ivey
March – July 2024 at 62 Dean Street, London W1D 4QF.

https://www.thesmallestgalleryinsoho.com/
https://www.mollygrad.com/