Once upon a time
                                                     God made this Elephant.
                                                     Then it was delicate and small
                                                     It was not freakish at all
                                                     Or melancholy

                                                     The Hyenas sang in the scrub      You are beautiful--
                                                     They showed their scorched heads and grinning
                                                     expressions
                                                     Like the half-rotted stumps of amputations--
                                                     We envy your grace                            
                                                     Waltzing through the thorny growth
                                                     O take us with you to the Land of Peaceful
                                                     O ageless eyes, of innocence and kindliness
                                                     Lift us from the furnaces
                                                     And furies of our blackened faces
                                                     Within these hells we writhe
                                                     Shut in behind the bars of our teeth
                                                     In hourly battle with death
                                                     The size of the earth
                                                     Having the strength of the earth

                                                     So the Hyenas ran under the Elephant's tail
                                                     As like a lithe and rubber oval
                                                     He strolled gladly around inside his ease
                                                     But he was not God no it was not his
                                                     To correct the damned
                                                     In rage in madness then they lit their mouths
                                                     They tore out his entrails
                                                     They divided him among their several hells
                                                     To cry all his separate pieces
                                                     Swallowed and inflamed
                                                     Amidst paradings of infernal laughter.

                                                     At the Resurrection
                                                     The Elephant got himself together with correction
                                                     Deadfall feet and toothproof body and bulldozing bones
                                                     And completely altered brains
                                                     Behind aged eyes, that were wicked and wise.

                                                     So through the orange blaze and blue shadow
                                                     Of the afterlife, effortless and immense,
                                                     The Elephant goes his own way, a walking sixth sense,
                                                     And opposite and parallel
                                                     The sleepless Hyenas go
                                                     Along a leafless skyline trembling like an oven roof
                                                     With a whipped run
                                                     Their shame-flags tucked hard down
                                                     Over the gutsacks
                                                     Crammed with putrefying laughter
                                                     Soaked black with the leakage and seepings
                                                     And they sing: "Ours is the land
                                                     Of loveliness and beautiful
                                                     Is the putrid mouth of the leopard
                                                     And the graves of fever
                                                     Because it is all we have--"
                                                     And they vomit their laughter.

                                                     And the Elephant sings deep in the forest-maze
                                                     About a star of deathless and painless peace
                                                     But no astronomer can find where it is.

                                                                                                                               Ted Hughes




Paradise Row presents Elephant Totem Song, Douglas White's second solo show at the gallery.

The works on show extend and deepen the language and sensibility of White's sculptural practice, at the heart of which lies an engagement with the transformative and the poetically redemptive possibilities of art. White works as scavenger and collector, retrieving discarded, overlooked and forgotten objects, natural and man-made. Through minimal, though profound sculptural interventions, namely reconfiguration and re-contextualization, White imbues the objects and materials with new life and new meanings.

Ted Hughes' Crow's Elephant Totem Song has long been an inspiration and touchstone to White. Forming part of Hughes' celebrated series of Crow poems, a dark, sprawling, 'folk-epic', full of subtle and oblique metaphor, the poem features an elephant, a walking innocent, killed by hyenas who envy his grace and peacefulness. They tear his entrails out and dismember him, and at 'the Resurrection', the elephant reassembles himself, so that though misshapen and his brains completely altered, he is now wise and disconnected from the world. Physical dismemberment and reconfiguration become metaphors for inner transformations.

In Elephant Totem Song, strange and wonderful parallels are drawn between the sculptures and the poem. The main body of new works are taken from a single, fallen beech tree, a huge carcass White found in the woods. White completely dismembered the tree, chain-sawing the massive trunk and excavating the roots, down to its thinnest tendrils... And in the gallery, the material is reconfigured, and is at once the thing-in-itself, the raw wood and fibrous material and also re-imagined as flesh, hunks of muscle, veins and capillaries. Sections sit on plinths, forming a display that serves as an essay on scale - from the monumental to the minute and fragile - and the eye is drawn in, observing forms within forms, and once again invited to experience myriad imaginative transformations.

At the end of the poem, we find the reconfigured elephant walking safe from the world of 'graves of fever', dreaming 'About a star of deathless and painless peace / But no astronomer can find where it is.' In the gallery, alongside the wood pieces, White displays a monumental new work from his Dark Moon series, employing wax and light to create a quietly exquisite work that glows - a mysterious, lunar surface.