Hannah Levy’s bulbous, bulging bodies

Hannah Levy isn’t trying to embody an object, but a feeling, “…like a body pushed up against the chair or a subway pole,” she explains when we speak on the eve of her exhibition opening at Massimo De Carlo, London. The Grade II listed, Georgian gallery is a curious stage for ‘Bulge’, her debut UK solo show; its anthropomorphic, furniture-like sculptures feel oddly at home amid the plush, pale green walls and carpets. “I’m used to showing in white cube galleries that have a concrete floor and white walls,” Levy explains, but in ‘Bulge’, she aims to make the space feel like “its own little world.”

Thin, steel rods have been welded, moulded and sanded down into sleek sculptures that resemble half-animals (the hind legs of a praying mantis and the legs of a spider), half-functional (chair, ottoman and sconces) objects. There is a sense that each is a living, breathing creature, as their bulbous forms–made by a glassblower–project outwards from their steel membranes. “My sculptures intend to heighten our senses of the things we interact with; for instance, we don’t necessarily think about sitting on a leather couch as a flesh couch.” The objects’ interiors are filled with either blown glass or silicon casts of lizard pleather, a texture reminiscent of basketballs, she explains. As we move from room to room, the complexity and tangibility of the sculptures heighten. “It’s like a starter, the build-up, and the end,” she says.

Modernist furniture was a key reference for Levy, pointing out that its principles are rooted in industrial processes and simplicity. She singles out Art Nouveau, particularly the works of French architect and designer Hector Guimard and his Paris Metro station designs. In her New York studio, Levy’s practice looks to traditional craftsmanship. “I bring the steel cages to the glassblower I work with and he blows directly into them,” Levy explains. This technique, rooted in traditional Venetian glassblowing, is a process that requires some control being relinquished to the material itself creating pieces that appear both fragile and robust, frozen in a moment of organic expansion.

The sculptures are all Untitled, and made of steel, glass, and silicon. “I like to create objects that look like furniture, or are furniture-like, and have these anthropomorphic or bodily elements,” Levy explains. Some of the sculptures are inspired by her studies of insect anatomy and its intricacies. The rounded glass in her wall-hanging sconces is held securely by animal-like claws. Her paradoxical compositions – between the functional and decorative, organic and industrial, internal and the external, living and prosthetic – draw viewers in with accessible imagery and metaphors associated with domesticity and modern industry as a means to help us understand our own relationship to our environments. As she explains, “Placing familiar forms into another context, leads to a heightened awareness of ourselves and how we interact with the world.”

At Massimo De Carlo’s additional viewing room on South Audley Street, Levy has cast an eight-foot tall silicon asparagus that occupies the window. The almost flaccid, fleshy appendage is positioned like a Renaissance reclining nude. “The asparagus is a form I’ve been interested in forever, not just because of its bodily associations, but also because it’s this weird alien vegetable that has a strange effect on your body—it makes your pee smell weird.”

In ‘Bulge’, Levy has seemingly sculpted her own body of experience, but it is clear that a more universal interaction (or interrelation) between the body and the world is central to her work. By subverting expectations about function and materiality, Levy invites viewers into a surreal, tactile world of fragmented forms in which viewers can think beyond the skin-like silicon surface, beyond the flesh, beyond the cage-like edges – but only so far.