Hence the term « recycling » has been mentioned with regard to his « columns », when he made cornucopias pouring out heaps of fruit, fish, riches and even unpleasant-looking insects, more suggestive of a « plague » than of a « manna ». His « Fruit of Oblivion » and the « Gift of Aphrodite » soon turn into a « Poisonous Libation ». Beyond the introspective irony and the closing effect of such a title, these pieces would appear to form a « literal » parenthesis within the development of Allington's work ; a parenthesis but not a break since they were prefigured by such works as « Fallen Towers » or « From Forgotten Seas » which represent the various stages from his « Ideal Forms » to other baroque, monstruous forms, openly and deliberately ornamental and decorative. The conchs, the shells, the ovolos illustrate the Dyonisiac modification, the exuberance of inebriety or of a sexual impulse directed against the rigorism of an ideal antecedent, invested with intrinsic or projected pureness.

The process of hybridation — as a result of the variations brought about and added to the formal « matrix » — could be misleadinng in Allington's case should it be considered in the light of the interest aroused by the specific contextual phenomenon referred to as the  «  new English sculpture ». If these is indeed any recycling at all in his work, it is only in his use of historical prototypes, his explicit quotations of temple pediments and Greek statuary, his resorting to ornemental motifs (the acanthus, volutes, balusters...), to architectural elements (capitals, columns, lintels.,,). It is Allington's firm belief that they bear witness to the reproductive capacity of our contemporary industrial society — society that takes pleasure in as well as is responsible for disseminating a countless amount of artificial copies of what is already an artifice in itself : the work of art. But from the outset this choice to reproduce models — or perhaps this restriction — distinguishes him from any contemporary artistic experience of disorting or metamorphosing the industrial object and making it appear under a new identity.

In Allington's work, identities are in a way already given. It is much more important to determine how, by interrelating — and not juxtaposing — these various elements, he tries to produce a form of cohesion that could find its expression in the emblematic figure of the« monument». Allington's haunting obsession about what is« fake »(and therefore what is Real) leads him to consider the object under: each of its facets or rather to experience its existence in successive, complementary ways. The latent idea is first shaped in drawing after which it is elaborated through the process of sculpture and sometimes reproduced in bronzes or lithographs. This would be the traditional procedure should each step not remain autonomous from the others and, as is the case here, should the approaches and methods not reach completion and full meaning when joined together.

Jacqueline Ford notes most rightly that«... in (his) drawings the image of sculptures is present by its absence, it appears like a silhouette. For Allington, drawing and sculpture maintain a relation similar to that of spirit and body which is only completed when the same unit of experience is ended  » . (2)

The drawings are not the genesis of sculptures. They form another organisation in which the elements are lined up, described, suspendend in the probability of their encounter before crystallizing into the wholeness of the sculpture. (See « The Room as a Box », « Odalisque», «   We are Time »...). This need for « interlocking » can be understood as a sexual metaphor (elements interpenetrate each other and fill in the cavities), as the urgency to arrange or to put away, not to lose anything, to gather everything into a Whole, stressed by a thick coating of paint uniformly applied, as a redundancy of this subjectal osmosis.