There is something uncanny in the sculpture of Kevin Yates – or more precisely, he sculpts a sense of the uncanny. Untitled (small dead woman) (2000) elicits a precise sense of uncertainty, a quick slippage, a domestic haunting.

Shifts in scale assist in the production of the uncanny. Yates’s earlier work, Untitled 1996-98, consists of live hermit crabs and polyester resin. The duration of the piece was required for the hermit crabs to outgrow their old shells and occupy the new transparent homes sculpted for them by the artist. – hold on to that feeling –

I went there for a spiritual experience (1999-2000) is an installation piece. In the centre of a room twelve feet square by eight feet high, a cedar bonsai is lit from above by a single spotlight. It is a machine for imagining a large landscape, a time and place and scale machine that blows up the room and shrinks you down, and suddenly you’re high up in the forest looking down on, and witnessing, one lilliputian person burying another in the shadows. – hold on to that feeling –

Untitled (small dead woman) (2000) is a life-like, yet miniature, sculpture of a woman lying face down on the floor of the gallery. The sliding scale and slippery signification of the sculpture generates a strong sense of the uncanny. It is a doll, the meaning of which develops in the direction of ambivalence until it begins to mean the opposite of itself. A doll is a small girl or a young woman; it is also a toy of domesticity.

A doll is innocent, nave, transitional between infant and adult, not yet fully formed. She’s pretty, a favourite, a mistress. A dolly is defined as a baby, an attractive girl or young woman, a slattern, a useless woman. She was probably asking for it, I mean, look at the way she was dressed. – hold on to that feeling –

And it seems that a doll is your tiny reflection, up very close, in someone else’s eyes.

Essay by Scott Sorli