Tony Rickaby

Reflecting the Market
Mixed media, dimensions variable, 1997

Linked artist Collaboration

Tony Rickaby’s work explores the conflicting meanings of the market: celebrative and oppressive, pre- and post-industrial, human and inhuman.
Nowadays we are all said to be controlled by The Market. Market forces underpin a rampant capitalism unsympathetic to those who lose out: the poor, the homeless, the unemployed. Hypermarkets and shopping malls proliferate as consumerism triumphs over community.
But the market also suggests the preservation and assertion of humanity. It is the age-old place for people to gather and look at things, to touch and handle them, to meet old friends and to banter as well as barter. Such a place, with its suggestions of both co-operation and individuality, still exists in today’s street markets and boot sales. With their transient structures and objects the old merges with the new, the natural with the artificial, the ephemeral with the durable.
As the traditional artefacts for containing and presenting in the marketplace, baskets have a natural, timeless quality. In Reflecting the Market they contain painted representations of trivia which thus find value through being displayed. Although the repetition of the piece suggests mass production, standardisation is resisted, with each element having a unique colour and shape.