Eileen Agar: Natural Ready-mades

Eileen Agar (1899-1991) sought out sculptural forms in nature, combing the shoreline for natural ready-mades that she choreographed into collages and sculptures. Natural Ready-mades explores Agar’s finely tuned observation of sculpture in nature through seven works made between 1935 and 1939.

Permeating her photographs and assemblages is a strong sense of visual pleasure, playfulness and wit, as shown by Marine Object 1939 at the centre of this focused display. This sculpture combines a Greek amphora that Agar purchased from a French fisherman (who found it caught up in his nets in Toulon) with a ram’s horn (picked up by the artist in Cumbria), a starfish (recovered from sea mud), and a marine skeleton.

From the 1930s onwards, Agar was an avid beachcomber. She used her shoreline bounty as material for objects and collages. Alongside Marine Object, two collages reveal Agar’s incomparable sculptural eye.

The first, which is also the earliest work in the exhibition, is an exquisite, vibrantly coloured box made in 1935. It deftly combines  a sea horse with coral, placed against a backdrop of a watercolour to form an underwater stage set. The second is a framed work on paper, where a sea creature cut-out is pasted on to a photograph sourced from a 1940s publication on classical sculpture.

In 1936 while on holiday in the Dorset coastal town of Swanage, Agar met Paul Nash (1889-1946), where he was compiling The Dorset Shell Guide for Shell-mex. Through this friendship, Agar received a studio visit from Roland Penrose (1900-84), who invited her to show her work in the ground-breaking International Surrealist Exhibition in 1936. Although Agar never saw herself as a surrealist, she described in her autobiography that:

“Surrealism for me draws its inspiration from Nature… you see the shape of a tree, the way a pebble falls or is framed, and you are astounded to discover that dumb nature makes an effort to speak to you, to give you a sign, to warn you, to symbolise your innermost thoughts.”

Eileen Agar, 1998

Directly after her 1936 exhibition, Agar travelled to Ploumanac’h and Perros-Guirec on France’s Brittany coast, where she was struck by the coastal rock formations. These she described as seeming “as if nature had arranged a show of sculpture in the open air.” Seeking out a camera, she set about creating an incredible series of photographs showing how the wind and sea sculpt nature. Four examples of her photos are included in this exhibition.