Darling’s sculptures are arguments against the cult of stability. They look provisional, braced, taped, bent—like infrastructure after impact—yet their fragility is not an aesthetic of defeat. It is a deliberate refusal of the heroic posture that modern sculpture inherited from monuments, industry, and masculine mastery. Darling asks a sharper question: who gets to appear “solid,” and at what cost? The work performs a politics of exposure, where vulnerability is not sentiment but structure—support systems visible, joints showing, failure anticipated and integrated. There is a quiet brilliance in how Darling treats materials associated with public space—metal rails, frames, barriers, fabrics, straps—as if they were prosthetics for social life. The sculptures seem to breathe with a contemporary condition: bodies and institutions held together by temporary fixes, austerity repairs, improvised care. They occupy the threshold between standing and collapsing, making that threshold the true subject. Precarity here becomes a language of ethics: to remain upright is not to be invulnerable, but to negotiate gravity collectively—through scaffolding, tenderness, and stubborn persistence. Darling’s work turns weakness into critique and endurance into form. It doesn’t romanticize damage; it insists that the politics of survival are built in plain sight, in the very devices that keep things from falling.
