Longing to Belong

James Lingwood on Mens Suits, 2009
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Photograph by Julian Abrams

Mens Suits contains multitudes. On an obvious level, LeDray’s sculptural ensemble includes hundreds of different parts which resemble suits, shirts, ties and hangers as well as a number of tables, display racks, laundry bags, ceilings and floors, all painstakingly recreated on a diminutive scale. Less overtly, a multiplicity of possible meanings are embedded within the complex arrangements of the work. Beyond the immediate pleasures offered by the kaleidoscopic array of patterned and coloured materials and the astonishing degree of detail, LeDray’s carefully constructed world offers a meditation on appearance and identity, sameness and difference; a mise-en-scène of our current social and economic condition and the way it uses and values people and things; and a reflection on the intertwining of sculpture and the vernacular over the past century.

All of this is distilled within three separate sections, each of them clearly demarcated by a rectangular floor on which different individual elements have been arranged, and a corresponding plasterboard ceiling from which fluorescent lights illuminate the tableaux below. The object of the sculpture comprises everything we see, from the dust resting on the top of the ceilings (themselves suspended from the ceiling of the space) to the dirt on the carpet and lino; from the voluminous number of elements made from clothing to the volume of space between the ceiling and the floor. They are like three-dimensional wedges which you can gaze into and look through.

Nothing is here by accident; everything – every last nuanced detail and implied incident - is by design. There is no particular sequence to the three sections, no beginning, middle and end; no specific narrative to follow through the successive stages of the encounter with the work, no overt pointers as to a particular interpretative route to follow. Mens Suits is a work which shows but does not tell.

In London, one of the first objects encountered is a scaled-down version of dressed tailor’s dummy, standing on a low wooden pedestal, which sits on a shabby floor of lino and carpet. The sculpture of the dummy - the most anthropomorphic of the many forms in LeDray’s sculpture – introduces what is everywhere and nowhere in Mens Suits: the human body. The extravagantly dressed figure is a work in progress, its tailoring as yet incomplete. It stands to attention, ready for inspection. Displaying its finest plumage, hoping to attract a mate, waiting for a body to be fitted to; or, like a ventriloquist’s dummy, a voice to speak for it.

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