Sugar and Spice

Sugar and Spice is wonderfully creepy. The nursery rhyme tells us ‘that’s what little girls are made of’, and here Don Driver alludes to both sides of human nature. The objects and materials in his assemblages are old, seemingly beyond use, but arranged with a meticulous regard for colour, composition and effect.

Driver trained as a magician when he was young, later saying that his ‘interest in magic followed into his works through the mystery of objects and things as icons’. Here, he performs a sleight of hand, giving mundane objects power to conjure up troubling subconscious associations, but retaining a quirky, mischievous quality.

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