JOE BUTLER posts a stout guard for the workers in the Temple Bar Gallery with a crescent rank of towering scrap metal soldiers. They stand like a terrifying receiving line, every component of their bric a brac bodies ready to transform into a grisly weapon at a moment's notice.
Anything metal, it seems, can find its way in here. Axes and flywheels, rakes and fences are all soldered stiffly together, forced to exist in close proximity, but never destined to enter into friendly relationships.
The tense self sufficiency of the figures is, as it happens, no bad thing. Most possess brutish sexual organs, looming martial phallus and a series of furious, bear trap vaginas, including one lined with long, vicious metal spikes breasts are jagged pinnacles and even fingers become implements of torture.
Occasionally a touch of glossy paint lends a confusingly vivid aspect to a figure, but closer inspection always reveals a nest of angry metal. In Butler's hands, iron seldom loses its brutish overtones. Indeed, objects which might formerly have seemed quite neutral quickly become menacing and intimidating.
In a similar fashion the significance of the individual figures is inflected by the presence of so many others. Butler seems to attempt to exploit the dissonance between the bottled up violence of his figures and the exuberant variety of shapes in which they appear. In the end, however, this contest is rather one sided, as anyone seeking autonomy in these ranks would soon be clubbed to the floor.
