Suspended in the entry portico of Somerset’s West wing is the last-minute, special addition of El Anatsui’s Fresh and Fading Memories, Part V (2007), one of the Ghanaian sculptor’s monumental bottle cap installations. The piece is flanked on either side by two towering totem sculptures by Zak Ové, built from wooden masks stacked on and into recycled speakers. Anatsui, who was the newest recipient of the Venice Biennale’s Golden Lion Lifetime Achievement award this year, has made a career playing with the transformative possibilities of everyday recycled materials; his contemporary, Ove, does the same.
Artists across media take waste matter and culturally imbued everyday objects as their raw sculptural material. Jebila Okongwu cuts and manipulates banana boxes into bright, logo-laden collages; Romuald Hazoumè creates visual puns with his plastic petrol cans restyled as masks, and Olu Amoda assembles industrial debris (funnels, nails, oil filters) into mechanomorphic animal sculptures.