Darren Sylvester

The ‘Heads of Snowmen’ comprises a series of multi-coloured, hand-blown glass heads, embellished with cast bronze features, including carrot noses, button eyes and a cheeky smoke.

At once a beacon of seasonal festivity, the severed Snowman head is both repellent and captivating, both redolent of atavism and the story of what is natural and inevitable; it is created, it melts, it dies. In short the essence of what it means to be human.

Drawn from a readymade palette based on the late American abstract artist Ellworth Kelly’s painting ‘Spectrum IX’ 2014, the suite of snowman heads are rendered in an opulent shimmering finish, ranging from solid blues and misty greens to bold yellows and reds, reminiscent of earlier ‘palettes’ the artist has utilized by fashion houses such as Balenciaga and Yves Saint Laurent.

Severed and decapitated from their glossy bodies, Sylvester’s snowmen heads appear frozen-in-time, underscoring the artists ongoing interest in how death is presented in pop culture.

Seen as an installation of 20 singular works in situ, ‘The Heads of Snowmen’ evokes the evergreen playfulness of sculpted snowman from life, or as seen in cinema, ominously underpinned by the violence of a head without its body. This very action between recognizable figure and distorted snow is held in time, a grotesque, saccharine deformed glowing orb with crude features and a blank expression. A reminder about how short and precious time is.