a thread of red

Last week saw the completion of a new artwork. It’s big. And red. And twisty. And in an internationally significant venue.

No, not Kapoor & Balmond’s Olympic titan. In that odd kind of serendipity I did my own twisty red thing last week. Made from around 50 miles of bright red polyester cotton in a former mill building in Derbyshire, ‘Twisted’ was finally completed.

Cromford Mill, located about five miles south of Matlock on the A6 is no ordinary mill. It’s the first one. The very first textile mill. In the world. Back in 1771 Richard Arkwright built the first water-powered cotton mill in the tiny village of Cromford. Drawing power from water out of the nearby lead-mines, he pioneered the powered means of production and mass production. In fact what Arkwright did back then was invent the factory.

It’s mind-blowing to think that places like China, whose colossal and rapidly expanding economy based on mass manufacturing, owes it all to a simple brick and stone building on the edge of the Peak District National Park.

In the 19th Century Shanghai was just a little port town, in the shadow of Suzhou – the region’s much older and more significant city 90km further north. But as a sea port, and effectively gateway to the rest of the world, it soon began to expand and consume ideas and technology from the west. The first cotton mill arrived in the 1880s powered by machinery imported from Lancashire, and by the end of the century the little Suzhou creek was lined with dozens of cotton mills. By 1900 it was thought that the Suzhou Creek mills alone produced enough cotton to cloth the entire Chinese population.

One of the largest cotton mills in town was the Tang Yin mill. It continued to spin cotton until the late 1980s. Around 10 years ago the site was developed into a cultural hub for Shanghai’s booming contemporary art scene – M50.

When I came to revisit the idea of creating a piece at Cromford Mill, I thought it would be a great idea to create a sister piece at M50. I knew loads of people there and had some great friends who could help me out. What’s more, I was heading back to China on another commission.

What I hadn’t anticipated however, was the fickleness of the Chinese Government. At some point earlier this year, the authorities decided that culture was a delicate thing and that all non-Chinese art had to be approved by the Central Cultural Bureau. What’s more, in Shanghai at least, this became rigourously enforced. By February my contacts in Shanghai told me that a number of high profile galleries had been raided and fined heavily for showing non-certified foreign art. The possibility of creating even a very temporary piece at M50 without a permit – which itself could take months – was just not going to happen.

Undeterred I concocted a plan to create a piece at night using red lasers. I found a little store selling lasers of all shapes and sizes. The owner tried to sell me one the size of a torch which he demonstrated would easily light a match! Wow- the fun you could have with that, starting fires with stealth…. Anyway, it was green and I needed red. Unfortunately red lasers aren’t as powerful, so I got the strongest small ones he had to test them out. That night I did a test – the beam was faint, but photographed really well. This was promising! It then started to drizzle a bit so I called it a day. I had one more night before I had to return to the UK. No problem, I’d start as soon as it got dark.

That night there was one of those incredible electrical storms you only get in subtropical climates. The sky sizzled with lightning and the rain came down in sheets.

The next night I went back to create the stealth masterpiece – the security guards wouldn’t even know what I was up to. I got everything set up. Camera on tripod, stick to keep the laser lines parallel. However, the previous night’s storm had cleared the humid air that had been building for days and the laser beam was barely there.

Such is the nature of installations outdoors anywhere. There’s no point battling nature – it’s always best to work with it where possible, and on that night nature just didn’t want to play.

So back to Cromford.

The first mill at Cromford is just a shell at the moment. After years as a colour and dye factory, the whole site is slowly being rescued by the Arkwright Society. Years of toxic pollution followed by neglect has taken its toll on the site. But slowly the buildings are being restored and the story of what went on in that historic site is being uncovered. Cromford Mill is a UNESCO World Heritage Site – as are the other Arkwright mills along the Derwent Valley. For me the opportunity to create a large and ambitious piece in such an important building was too good to pass up. Fortunately the Arts Council thought so too and have supported the piece in Derbyshire.

The piece was installed with my crack team of technicians in just four days. The thread wound between the two frames in a continuous line clockwise around the piece. Hi-tech big red elastic bands helped keep the tension even across the piece.

For visitors to Cromford Mill, the piece has temporarily given life and purpose to the otherwise empty building. While the piece is in place visitors on the regular guided tours will be given the rare chance to see inside this, the most important building on the site. There’s also plans to have open days over the summer months for anyone to see the piece. If you’re not already on my mailing list, just sign up here to find out open dates.

Standing over 6m high at one end and stretched over 35m along the length of the original building, it’s on a scale that explores the vast space of this first factory. The twisting motion recalls the heritage of the place whilst creating an architectural form which reveals itself only when you step inside the giant 4m frame. Like all my pieces, I think it has a presence which you can only experience by being there. while the shapes and the colour throw up some great images photographically, the scale of the piece – the way the lines zoom away from you up into the ceiling, the constant optical movement of the red lines, the way the piece from the side is barely there, and yet as you move around it seems to materialise and disappear in phases.

I guess you’ve just got to be there.

Light part#1

So, I did China again. Well, a tiny corner of it is more accurate – it’s a really big place.

I went over to make a new piece for Cumbrian paper manufacturer James Cropper Speciality Papers. I’ve been doing temporary installations in the landscape for them for a couple of years now. It’s all part of their way of using their association with the stunning landscapes of the lake District as part of their identity on the international stage. Although the thought of selling mountains, lakes and paper to the Chinese has always tickled me a bit.

Last year I blogged the whole process of the piece I made for them. This year things weren’t so straight forward. A very recent clamp-dow on non-Chinese artists showing work, or even working in China has complicated things somewhat. All non-Chinese artists and their work have to currently get approval from the Bureau of Culture before their work can be shown in mainland China. A rule they have been enforcing quite rigorously in Shanghai lately with several prominent contemporary art galleries inspected on a weekly basis and some issued hefty fines for sowing un-approved work. The result of this meant that my normal studio space at island 6 was unavailable, and most studios in the city were unwilling to let to a foreign artist at short notice. The ensuing saga couldn’t even be blogged as WordPress, along with almost every other social networking platform is now blocked in China.

Fortunately, through other friends in the UK, I was introduced to the Art School in Suzhou – a city about 70 miles north of Shanghai - and they were all too happy to offer me space in return for a lecture or two. The Institute is a vast campus about 5 miles outside the city centre – no good for nipping to the shops or sight-seeing, but fantastically quiet with views to wooded hills with pagodas on the top. So very unlike Shanghai!

The piece I was building – ‘Cortex’ – was a development of last year’s piece, still using the motif of a twisted mountain tree. This time the tree would be cloaked in a skin of thousands of die-cut paper shapes. The inspiration I think started with a fantastic book of the designs of Alexander McQueen, in particular this piece made from oyster shells:

VOSS, spring/summer 2001
Overdress of panels from a nineteenth-century Japanese silk screen; underdress of oyster shells; neckpiece of silver and Tahiti pearls
Neckpiece by Shaun Leane for Alexander McQueen courtesy of Perles de Tahiti
Dress courtesy of Alexander McQueen
Photograph © Sølve Sundsbø / Art + Commerce

I loved the way the rigid individual shapes draped and softened the form, and the subtle play of light and shadow which accentuated every curve. I liked Alexander McQueen stuff. He was a true genius.

So that there were no surprises in China with the piece, I did a series of tests on a variety of forms in my studio before I went. The final test, created on a rootball was photographed on Esthwaite Water for some local context.

The piece in China was much bigger and took far longer to do – 5,300 individual pieces were cut out and attached, one-by-one over four days. The tree was sourced by one of the fine-art lecturers from one of the nearby forests.

Here it is with a bit of genuine Chinese landscape (well, art school anyway).

It was only after photographing the piece, along with hundreds of detail shots for the client to use in brochures etc., that I realised how important light was to my work. I guess I’d just got used to our far more subtle northern light, and what was essentially the same piece in China just didn’t work the same way as the piece back in Cumbria. The light in Jiangsu province was much flatter – shapes lost the subtlety I was used to. A much flatter landscape didn’t really help either. However, the colours were much stronger and became far more important.

The original aim of the piece was to simply to take one of my landscape installations and take it inside. Take a bit of what I do in the Cumbrian landscape and transport that to China.

What happened, in my eyes at least, was show just how very different Cumbria is to China. And how very much part of my work the landscape of Northern England is – not just it’s physical location, but its palette, textures and most importantly, the light.

after a fashion

Last weekend I watched a couple of documentaries on telly about David Bailey. One was a docudrama about one of his early shoots for Vogue in New York with Jean Shrimpton. This was followed by an interview with Bailey himself, and his contemporaries about his early career. A good evening in front of the box with a glass of wine or two and I found myself yearning for my old photography days.

Back in my photography life, I didn’t really do fashion. Mostly I did editorial stuff – general shots of places and events. I guess the closest I got to the glamorous life was the stuff I did for music magazines. I did mostly live shots of bands, from sweaty little clubs in Edinburgh, to big names in big venues and the obligatory summer festivals. Even in the ’90′s most of the music press still liked black and white pics for live reviews for some reason.

A young-looking Jarvis Cocker at the very first T in the Park festival for Q magazine but never used (apologies for the bad print!)

I was never really a portrait photographer either, but the other day I managed to dig out a series of pics I did in the mid-’90′s. During a particularly liquid interview with singer Julianne Regan  in London, we got chatting about what happens to pop stars when they disappear from view. This was in the days before Never Mind the Buzzcocks and years before any kind of 80′s revival and reforming nostalgia bands.

This got me looking through my trusty record collection at the time – I got my first CD player in 1987, so vinyl represented everything before that point. I went through all kinds of random singles and albums and whittled a list down to those who had top 20 singles, which removed all those obscure bands no-one ever remembers anyway, and took away anyone who had at least attempted a come-back of some sort. I think my initial list was still 50 or so missing in the line of duty. I pitched the idea of a series to a local music magazine in Glasgow who agreed to run the series for a few months to see how it worked out. That also gave me some legitimacy when tracking down these lost heroes of mine.

Over a period of six months or so, I hooked up with around 20 pop stars from the ’80′s, along with some who just made it to the 90′s and one-hit wonders. The list was a very personal one. Only people in my existing record collection qualified, so it’s more than a little tainted by my own taste – mostly synth-pop it seems. The project was also a very simple one – track down onetime pop stars, meet up for n informal chat and document it. As I’ve mentioned before, my photography has always been influenced by french photojournalism. I was more interested in capturing a moment in time and place than anything else. I wasn’t interested in creating sleek, or deep portraits. The series was about meeting these people – mostly down the pub, and just having a chat about the present and future. I was a crap journalist anyway. I never thought about probing questions, or even preparing for interviews. I was quite happy just to have a chat about anything really. The only restriction I put on myself was that the chats were not about the past. It wasn’t a nostalgia thing, or fan worship, but more like catching up with old friends – only I’d never met them before… bit creepy…

I dug some of the first batch of prints out the other day. For those who care about these things, everything was shot on Ilford HP5, printed on Agfa Record Rapid and selenium toned. My scanner is a bit crap these days and there’s too much dust in the shadows so excuse the quality. The stuff I did back then doesn’t really fit with what I’m doing at the moment, so it won’t go on my website. But it was fun to do at the time so here’s a small selection from the series:

J J Jeczalik from the Art of Noise

I think JJ was one of the first people I met for this project. We had coffee outside a pub near Bayswater in London. We mostly talked about technology and the tendency to exploit its capabilities, just because it can, rather than its ability to do stuff better necessarily. The Art of Noise were always an anonymous band – more about the music than the people behind it, so I thought it would be good to keep his identity hidden. As such, this was the only constructed image in the series.

Gary Langan (Art of Noise) at Metropolis Studios

Gary Langan was still involved in the music industry and ran one of London’s top recording studios. I’d been to quite a few studios in the past, both through music mags and recording with my own band, but this was the first time I’d been in one of the top gaffs. It even had a lift up the middle. It was HUGE! Gary, on the other hand, was one of the most down to earth and ordinary people I met in the series. It turned out he lived round the corner from where I went to school too. Small world. We did the photos through the mesh around the industrial lift in the converted power station.

Frank Maudsley - Flock of Seagulls

The magazine in Glasgow was only a small affair with no money but an amazing ability to blag anything. They managed to blag me my train tickets to Liverpool so I could hook up with a few people in the city. The first meeting in the Adelphi Hotel went well, and as my last meeting got cancelled at the last-minute, I ended up spending most of the day with the Flock of Seagull‘s bassist. It was my first visit to Liverpool, so Frank was keen to show me all the Beatles’ sights – Strawberry Fields, Penny Lane and all that. However, we ended up back at his fairly ordinary suburban house drinking earl grey tea in the conservatory. As soon as we’d done the pictures though, we went back into town to his brothers’ bar where we got absolutely hammered and I just made it to my last train back to Glasgow.

Julian Close - Red Box

A couple of meetings happened in record company offices. from red-wedge band Red Box was head of A&R at EMI at the time – about as far from socialism as you could get. Mostly I ended up sitting there while he handled an endless stream of calls, the content of some I could not possibly divulge here, but was certainly an eye-opener into the world of chart hits. On another shot you can make out the names on some of the demo tapes on the desk – a real moment in time.

Ian Mc Nabb - the Icilcle Works

By contrast, I met Ian Mc Nabb in the offices of a much smaller label. He’d just recorded an album with Crazy Horse – better known for working with Neil Young. To be really honest, I only had one single by the Icicle Works and had no idea about what else they did, so it was a bit of a bluffing session for me. Also in the office that day were the Tindersticks, who I had no idea about either. I met Ian again a few years later in a bar in Glasgow. Turned out he was going out with one of the bar staff. Random.

zoe - she sang 'sunshine on a rainy day'

Despite not knowing anything about Ian McNabb, what we did agree on was what an amazing, and surprisingly good album Zoe had recorded. I had a promo tape (still got it) of an album she made with the Chieftains and produced by Youth, from Killing Joke. It was kind of like a Sandy Denny signing with Led Zeppelin thing – very folky and quite rocky in a classic 70′s kind of retro way (told you I was a crap journo). However, she was a troubled creature at the time and sacked her manager. This made the record label nervous and the album was never released. We met in a pub on Portobello Road in London. She had this wonderful henna’d pattern on her hands, but I was using available light and she had a bit of the shakes, so I think this was the only shot you could see them in.

Also in Portobello Road I met up with Steve Luscombe and  from Blancmange.

Steve Luscombe & Pandit Dinesh - Blancmange

That was another tea drinking chat. All very civilised. We sat in the kitchen and talked about Bollywood string orchestras.

The last meet-up was with Claudia Brucken

Claudia Brucken - Propaganda

We met for breakfast in Camden. I remember that much. Propaganda were, and still are, one of my favourite bands from the 80′s, so I was probably more star-struck with her than any of the others. I probably talked nonsense over my coffee and croisant. But still, there were plenty of people who understood that. i mean having breakfast with Claudia Brucken! It was a sunny day so I should have got better pictures, but hey…

There were 26 people in the final series from all over the UK. The magazine ran four or five of them before it folded. So I put together an exhibition of prints with short interview extracts. I blagged some paper off Ilford Photographic (call it sponsorship if you like) and hooked up with the independent record chain Fopp to tour it around their shops in Glasgow, Edinburgh and Sheffield. The images were printed 12′ square and displayed in clear record sleeves in the windows. All done on a zero budget.

However, one day I was walking past the shop on Byres Road in Glasgow and saw a small crowd looking at the exhibition in the window. There was a bloke who used to sell flowers outside the shop who I got to know, and he told me it was like this most of the day every day. And as the window was lit at night, continued until late most nights too. That was a lot of people! far more than I ever saw in, say the Collins Gallery. That was a pivotal moment for me. It made me realise that not only did more people go to record shops than contemporary art galleries, but that taking work out to your audience is a far more rewarding thing than hoping your audience will come to you. It’s something I’ve done ever since and it’s why I do what I do now.

I make no claim the pictures are classics in any way. I don’t think any come close to being my best work. Some are even embarrassingly bad. But for me, they represent a turning point in my career – a eureka moment.

I’ve never met David Bailey. In fact I’ve only ever met one fashion photographer – the late great Norman Parkinson, and we had a really good chat about sausages.

 

post script

since posting this I have learnt that Glasgow City Council, in its infinite wisdom, have decided to licence all events and exhibitions in the city from April 2012. THis would mean any exhibition, regardless of where, by who and how many people see it, will need to apply for an entertainment licence. Fees, even for non-profit making ventures, start at £124 and rise to over £7,000. More than this, the application process is another bit of unnecessary paperwork and means you will no longer just be able to put on a show at short notice. If that had been in place in 1996, I’d never had done the exhibitions in shop windows. Besides the cost of the licence, even the process of applying would put me off. Even had I got the knowledge to apply, it would probably make me want to do something less raw and intuitive. Projects like this and 1997′s ‘Kiss My Ass’ exhibition in the toilets of the 13th Note Club put me on the road to what I’m doing now. Without them I’d probably be doing something far less exciting, as would thousands of other artists, musicians, performers doing experimental stuff in odd places all over the city.

There’s a petition to get the council to think twice – please sign it here.

 

figures

It’s still winter outside. They keep telling me it’s an unusually mild winter this year, but twice this week I’ve woken up to more than a dusting of snow. Certainly enough to sledge in, and needs brushing off the car as it’s too much for the windscreen wipers. Still, I’m not complaining. I quite like the stuff.  Besides, it’s still warm indoors and I get to catch up on some reading.

Lately I’ve been catching up on one of my current favourite blogs – BLDGBLOG and this morning came across an article on this image:

Fort Moore Hill High School (Pound Cake Hill, Signal Hill) being moved across Temple Street and Broadway, Los Angeles, 1886

Apparently, the town wanted to move the building to another site and found a contractor who claimed to be able to move anything anywhere. However, after getting the building halfway down the road, the contractor changed his mind, said it was impossible and the building was left. It’s a shame it wasn’t left up on its stils – it would be an incredible sight!

I got to thinking about the engineering and mechanics of lifting a building off a hill and moving it down the road, and all the calculations that needed to be done to check it could actually be done at all. I presume it would have involved lifting, sliding, rolling and then lowering down what appears to be some distance. All that done without the aid of lovely computer modelling or big lifting gear.

Among the first great engineering feats to use computer modelling was the Sydney Opera House. The architect, Jørn Utzon, originally designed the shell-shaped roofs with parabolas of ‘indeterminate proportions’. Only after building lots of scale models with the engineers Ove Arrup, did they finally come up with a solution based on sections of a sphere.

It’s all very well coming up with an idea to do something on a grand scale, even how it looks and functions. Knowing it’s going to do what you said it would do, and proving that beforehand, is a task in itself.

I’ve learnt to my cost that just believing in something isn’t enough. As the pieces I make get bigger, and the numbers of people coming to see them increases, it’s ever more important to ensure they work structurally.

Lately I’ve been spending far more of my preparation time immersed in engineering calculations. To float the spires on river Nene I had to submit detailed plans with calculations showing how they float, stay upright, and how they will behave in strong winds and flood conditions. So I now know how to calculate the forces generated by fast flowing water, wind resistance and how concrete used as ballast behaves differently in water than above water.

I’m also currently looking at alterations to the Drop piece to open up the inside space, which means calculating the effect of wind on large areas of fabric – both loose and under tension.

Part of the beauty of doing temporary installations is making things which are just too fragile to be permanent out of materials not designed to be permanently sturdy. That way you can really push the materials to the limit without worrying about how long it’ll last. The downside is that very often you end up doing stuff that’s never been done before with untried and tested methods.

When James Cropper Papers originally asked me what I could do with paper, I said I’d love to build a bridge in the lakes out of it. When I subsequently said the bridge would not only take people walking on it, but you could ride a horse over it, the gauntlet was well and truly thrown down.

I’ve long been a fan of Shigeru Ban’s paper architecture. The Japanese architect builds incredible structures using paper tubes as the primary material, including this bridge at Remoulin, France in 2007.

Shigeru Ban uses rolls of paper formed into tubes for his paper structures. These are good sturdy forms to start off with, but the real beauty in his pieces is in the engineered steel and wooden joints which direct the load down the tubes’ strongest side. The resulting buildings, pavilions and roofs are elegant examples of geometric design. However, I wanted a more purest approach for my paperbridge using sheets of paper. Just paper. Only paper.

Just to make things interesting, calculations for such a structure don’t exist. Instead, as with Utzon’s curves in Sydney, most of the design work is going to be done through scale models of ever-increasing size. This one from last week can clearly support its own weight in water. Which is a relief. Although I’d calculated it probably would.

Tally

It’s that time of year again. The end. To outsiders it looks like a quiet time. True, most of my work takes place outside, and the better the weather the busier I seem to be. The truth however is not quite like that. These dark, cold winter months are when the real work behind the projects happens. It’s when I sit down with the big list of stuff and think about what, how and when generally. So before I get really stuck in to next year’s work, here’s a quick reflection on all the 2011 stuff.

It’s been a year of outside. Of rediscovering my passion for music and photography, and what makes my creativity tick. It’s also been a year of probably taking too much on and occasionally suffering the consequences. But on the whole it’s been a good year, if not a great year. It’s certainly been an interesting journey….

Boxed (detail) - Paper - 800mm x 1200 x 300

The early weeks of the year were mostly spent on site visits for later projects in the UK, but the first piece out of the stable came in China.

Boxed was a reflection on landscape – the rugged Cumbrian one vs the rapidly growing Shanghai one. In the end it was the fast-paced Shanghai ethic that won through – due to a customs mix-ups the piece was built and installed within a couple of days! The time spent nervously waiting in China did however afford me the opportunity to blog in much more detail about the piece, and in many respects made it a much more solid piece.

That was March. April seemed to not happen. A mix of Easter hols, bank hols, & royal hols.

This year I did a couple of projects with schools. For many artists, this is bread and butter work, but for me this was a bit of a first. I’d kind of steered away from it for a variety of reasons – the same with running ‘workshops’ generally. However a couple of interesting takes on working in schools came my way, and besides, it’s good to take yourself out of your comfort zone once in a while. The first of these to finish was in the village school in Wreay near Carlisle.

WhooshySpinney - 1,200 toy windmills - 35m x 20m approx.

It became apparent quite early on that they’d actually quite like a nice big, ambitious installation really, because. Just because. That in itself was quite a fun prospect. For them it was a chance to do something big and ambitious. Big and ambitious are things that don’t really happen in the national curriculum so for them it was a chance to go outside their comfort zone too. I loved this piece. It was a great school to work with and the staff and kids were all incredible. The final piece did all the things I wanted it to do. There was a ‘wow’ factor in the scale of it, and there was enough detail in the little bits which kept it interesting. Above all, it was and experiential piece – the sounds of the windmills, the way the wind moved across the meadow in waves. The movement of colour. The playfulness of the whole field coming alive. It was a difficult thing to document – not even the video footage comes close to capturing what it was like to be there. Pure magic. And you really had to be there.

A last minute change in plan meant that June was spent finding locations and securing permissions again for other projects.

July saw the start to the silly summer. At one time it looked as though there was an installation going in or coming out every week for the whole summer. A prospect, which when I sat down to work out how, realised I just couldn’t do on my own and resulted in employing a regular assistant – Beckie. And the madness began.

84Spires - paper & textile spires - 600mm high ea.

The centre piece for the summer was always going to be ‘SevenSpires’ – an installation of giant red spires along half a mile of the Oxford Canal. Before then though was another workshop (one of those years) and the resulting ’84 Spires’ piece in Oundle.

TreeCreeper#2 - paper, wood - approx 2m long

TreeCreepers (2 of them to start off with) were installed in the woods and big paper installations were assembled and disassembled in the studio, along with the seven spires.

For the whole of the summer the studio became a hive of activity. It even remained reasonably ordered throughout. I’m lucky that I have a reasonably sizeable studio / workshop. However, 5m spires and 3m cube paper installations pushed its capacity on occasions.

Every one of the spires tested and finished in the studio before being shipped to Northamptonshire – all the fabric panels being sewn on my trusty machine into the early hours. ‘SevenSpires’ was another enjoyable installation. It took the best part of a year to plan and realise it, every last detail and logistic covered so that the final install went in without a hitch. The install teams were brilliant, and it. just. Worked.

SevenSpires - wood & textile installation - over 680m length

The next piece was done on a much shorter timescale and minuscule budget and sort of didn’t…

TwistedPuzzle - polyester thread, wood - 2.2m x 2.2m x 2.2m

The ‘twisted’ pieces for the Wirksworth Festival in Derbyshire should have been even more impressive. I had an entire mill building to play with for a start. On paper it was fairly straight forward. A few thousand metres of thread woven between two wooden frames. The festival would build the frames for me and even supply all the extra pairs of hands needed to make it in the four days I had between other pieces. Simple. Only it wasn’t. The frames weren’t ready on time, and the volunteer install teams were different each day, and sometimes not there at all. Beckie and I managed to build the smaller piece in the twisting alleyways of Puzzle Gardens in a day and hinted at what could have been with the bigger one. For a whole host of reasons the bigger piece never got finished and was subsequently dismantled. It’s sad when things go so wrong so quickly. It’s still a good piece, albeit in my head for now, but it’s going to have to stop by in my ‘to be continued’ file for a bit.

Still, no time for mourning. There were still more pieces to realise.

Pinched (Flow) - paper - 3m x 3m x 3m

I sweated a bit over the next piece – ‘Pinched’. A three metre high paper installation at a trade fair in Monaco. The piece had been in development for months. Test pieces were built. Changes made. Details refined. It took much longer to get the piece to work as well as I had wanted it to. It must have changed shape, colour, size, construction method countless times over the development stages. The final 3,000 pieces of paper were die cut and the piece was part assembled and shipped over ahead of us. Again the weeks of planning and testing paid off as the piece had to be installed in just one and a half days. Despite some last-minute hiccups with automated lighting and French fire regulations it was still up and finished in time, and it was all worthwhile.

Working in the south of France for a week may sound great, but there was yet more to do back in the UK.

PencilCase - pencils, plywood - 1800mm x 1800mm x 280mm

The other school project was due to go in before the start of the Autumn term. However, fabrication and budget issues were delaying things and the busy summer schedule meant it was October before we could get back to it. The Learning Path at a school in Kendal consisted of three main pieces – ‘self reflection’ – a Perfect circle mirror polished into a bank of lockers; ‘text + book’ – a 12m long text piece along a glass corridor culminating in a book crashing through a window; and ‘pencilcase’ – a display theatre constructed from 2,800 red Cumberland pencils. Although I personally really like the pieces, and it was an interesting approach to working in schools, I’m still not convinced they didn’t actually want a mural or a mosaic after all. At the end of the day, the subtlety and layered readings of the presented pieces might just be lost in the mayhem of secondary school. Time will tell. Either way, despite a fantastic experience with the first school and some great kids and occasional staff at the second school, I’m in no hurry to make schools work a staple of my work. Still, it was good to have a taster.

The year ended with the delivery of the wonderful woven blankets from the previous year’s Clad installation. Just in time for the hard winter that’s bound to happen up here on my mountain.

Clad Throw - pure, unbleached Welsh wool - 1900mm x 1560mm

So it’s been a busy year. The projects above were only half the pieces I made this year. In addition to all that there was also presentations and research in rural Sweden and Paris, other projects worked up and costed which never came off, various articles and features, lectures and a divorce. So, before I dive into the start of the 2012 projects, time for a sit down and a nice cup of tea.

Yorkshire Tea - milk, no sugar - one hot mug-full

There. That’s nice.

the after art

The other week I finished installing a number of pieces at a school in Cumbria. Three pieces were linked in a linear way through a part of the school to explore the path of learning. The line started with a giant mirror polished into the bank of lockers and ends with a display theatre made from 3,000 red pencils. It was as always, good fun to do stuff like this. However, the biggest challenge was the permanence of the pieces. A school is not the most conducive of venues for art installations at the best of times, and especially challenging for me as most of my work relies on being temporary.

As I’ve written about in previous posts, most of my large-scale pieces are only ever up for 16 days or less. The benefits of this are both logistical – they don’t need planning permission for a start – but also allow me to make pieces with the  delicacy and fragility you can’t get in permanent pieces.

The downside to working with short-term projects is what to do with stuff afterwards. These can be enormous pieces – some measured in miles. Were they just to lounge around in my studio afterwards I ‘d very rapidly run out of room to make new pieces.

There’s also the issue I’m uncomfortable with creating more stuff for the sake of art. The world’s resources are finite, and I’m not sure that artists creating stuff is really helping.

So, when designing new pieces I build in a plan of what to do with it when it’s all over.

Back in the winter of 2009 / 2010, I created one of my favourite pieces to date: ‘Clad’. A derelict 18th century Welsh cottage was covered in the fleeces of two of the local sheep breeds to recreate the black and white timber frame so typical of the area. Around 300 raw fleeces were used in the piece. A chunk was provided by the Wool Marketing Board, whose main Welsh depot was just across the river from the piece. Others were supplied by local farmers, interested in how it could raise the profile of what they do.

As with a lot of my larger pieces, there was a lot of media interest. In particular the farming press and media. There was a nice feature on Ffermio on S4C – a bit like a Welsh language Countryfile – and a good programme on Radio 4′s ‘On your Farm’ – the longer Sunday version of Farming Today. As a rural artist I feel really flattered when my work features in the farming section rather than the arts bit. Although it was nice to get a glowing review in the Guardian too.

Farmers being good practical people, typically wanted to know if there was a practical benefit to the piece. I guess the cottage inside would have een warmer, but as it was structurally unsafe you’d never know. But it did get me thinking to what would happen to all the fleece afterwards.

It was all raw, greasy fleece, in some cases straight off the sheep’s back. Being upland sheep breeds, the fleece was really good at repelling water – if it didn’t sheep would be squashed with all the weight every time it rained. The winter was one of those particularly snowy ones, so the fleece had a lot to cope with and I had no idea how well it would survive.

A chance conversation with Sue Blacker at the Natural Fibre Company led to the possibility of at least scouring (cleaning) the fleeces with a view to spinning some yarn. As it happened, the fleeces were still in a good condition when the piece was finally taken down, and a few months down the line still showed little sign of rot. So the bags of fleece were bundled into the back of my car – as many as I could fit – and I took them down to Cornwall.

The Natural Fibre Company specialises in scouring small quantities of fleece and spinning in to yarn. In doing so they have been instrumental in making it possible for smallholders and rare-breeds farmers to create woollen yarns and in turn raising the profile of small sheep farming in the UK.

All the fleece was scoured without bleaching to retain its natural colour, and spun into yarn for weaving into blankets.

From this point I could have sent the yarn to any number of commercial weavers o make the blankets. However, there was a story behind the original installation, and the subsequent fleece, so it was important to continue that with the blankets.

The yarn was then sent to Melin Teifi – a weaving company at the National Museum of Wool in Wales where the owner Raymond worked from a pile of photos of the installation to create a one-off pattern which matched the proportions of the original timber frame architecture. More importantly, the weaving style was the same as that which made the town of Newtown all those years ago.

In May of this year, the Port House – the little thatched cottage underneath Clad, was burnt down. The owners, while sad that a part of their family history is now gone, are proud of its moment of glory as an artwork.

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I also wonder – can the recycling of artworks help sustain the creation of new pieces?

I now have these beautiful throws which were once an artwork, and are now a work of the art of spinning and weaving. I’ve also got something I’ve never had before – something to sell. It’s all new ground to me, and it’ll be interesting to see how that works out.  I’ve decided to put all the money made from the throw sales directly into making new work in the hope this will lead to some kind of sustainable model for creating large-scale works in the landscape in due course.

The throws are available on my website here, and will also be sold through the Oriel Davies gallery shop in Newtown. More stockists are to come and I’ll update this as we go along. The ‘Beyond Pattern’ exhibition for which Clad was commissioned, ends its tour at 20-21 Visual Arts Centre in Scunthorpe from 3rd December until February next year. Details here.

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Another common enquiry I have is for more information about past pieces. From time to time students at all levels seem to come across pieces and want to know a little but more – how things were built, where the ideas came from and so on. I’ve always been bad about keeping my website up to date, but I’ve finally made a start on cataloguing everything. I now have an archive covering the bigger pieces over the past five years. I’ve completed about  a third of those so far with a bit of background detail and a gallery of pics including initial ideas, scrapped ideas, research stuff and how pieces were made. Still a way to go – with over 50 big pieces since 2005 alone, it’s a fairly major task, but the start has been made…

LookingGlass

There’s a new exhibition at Tate Liverpool at the moment – Alice in Wonderland. I’m not a big fan of Tate Liverpool, I have to admit, even less of the city itself, however it looks like being an interesting show. I’ve seen a few exhibitions relating to Alice in Wonderland, including an amazing one at the Barbican in the ’80′s when they discovered the original engravings of Tenniel’s classic illustrations in an old bank vault in Lndon, and made a new set of prints form thses 150 year old plates.

I’ve been collecting the illustrations of the Alice books and other Lewis Carroll works for years. I remember being eight or nine at my grandparents’ house in Dorset in the summer holidays and finding a beautiful copy of Alice through the Looking Glass in a bedside cabinet. It had all the usual Tenniel illustrations, and some were in colour too. I remember reading it and being bowled over by the whole dream-like imagery – the way things became comepletely unrelated other things. And the lushness of the chessboard landscape with the little brooks running through it. The image of the Red Queen in particular is one which stays with me today.

I remember it being a little red book too…

Those childhood memories came back when I was at art school (briefly), when I discovered the pre-raphaelite photographers and found that Charles Dodgson (Carroll’s real name) was one of the really early photographers. Coming from a little village in North Yorkshire, Carroll found that his knowledge  of this new technology could open doors into the world of his heroes. One of his earliest portraits was of the Tennysons while they were staying at Monk Coniston in the Lakes. It was through inviting himself to the Tennysons that he was introduced to Ruskin, and subsequently the families of Millais, Holman Hunt and  Rosetti. In great Pre-Raphaelite style he would get his subjects - admittedly, mostly the kids – to dress up as some romantic hero character.

Hallam Tennyson (aged 5) at Monk Coniston, 1857

To put things into context, photography was invented around 1840. Two competing formats – the Daguerrotype invented in France, and the Calotype by Fox Talbot were both protected under patents. It wasn’t until the ‘wet colodian’ process was finally made available in 1855 that anyone else was allowed to start taking photos. Dodgson really was one of the early pioneers. Most early amateurs (they all were – professional photographers hadn’t been invented) concentrated on landscapes as they didn’t move around as much for the 10 minute exposure times. Dodgson, however, not only pursued portraiture, but the ultimate challenge of fidgety kids.His story-telling abilities kept them still and focussed. A prolific photographer, Dodgson took some 6,000 known portraits of people of all ages in his lifetime.

Rather like the central character in Fellini’s ‘La Dolce Vita‘, Dodgson used his reputation for family portraiture to enter what he saw as the glamourous world of artists and poets – hanging around with the contemporary artists of the day.

He gave up photography when the technology became simpler and more people started to do it. (Also, he was never as good as Julia Margaret Cameron).

Julia Margaret Cameron - 'the parting of Lancelot'

It was only then that he started his literary career. As ‘Lewis Carroll’, he had an incredible talent for words – exploring language and creating words of his own. After Shakespeare, Carroll has contributed more words to the English language than anyone else.

Above all, what draws me to his works is the strength in imagery. It’s the creation of these impossibly imagined worlds that has continued to influence artists ever since.

I have a fair collection of various illustrated versions of Alice in Wonderland – from the tame and mundane, to the weird and frankly twisted.

Arthur Rackham's illustrations for Alice in Wonderland (1907)

Arthur Rackham – one of my personal favourites (and evidently a huge influence on Tim Burton’s film) was the first artist to tackle the story after it came out of copyright. Since then, over 500 artists have illustrated Alice in Wonderand alone.

rare photographic cover image given away with Sugar Puffs in the '70's

Rene Cloke (1943)

photographic montage illustrations by Hugh Gee (1948)

Fiona Fullerton as Alice in the 1973 British film

Alain Gauthier (1991)

from the 'Scary tales' version...

However, it’s the second Alice book – Through the Looking Glass, which continues to inspire me. A while ago I started reading it to my young kids as a bedtime story. One chapter a night, each night a different illustrator. Even now I’m blown away with some of the visual ideas. The ticket inspector looking at Alice through binocuars, then through a microscope, then through a telescope. This was 50 years before surrealism! Or the shop where everything moves to a shelf above the one you look at. Where everything is on the fringe of your vision. Surely the stuff Dr Who nightmares are made of.

another of my favourites - Maraja (1949)

Henry Morin

the incredible Mervyn Peak (1946)

Philip Gough (1949)

In fact Alice’s adventures in Carroll’s headspace became hugely influential in the 20th Century. The imagery and logic became key texts for hundreds of artists, designers, mathematicians and philosophers – from Bretton and Magritte to Freud, Einstein, Lennon, and hell, yes even Gwen Stefani:

About fifteen years ago, I made a – probably half-hearted – attempt to do my own version of Through the Looking Glass. It involved making lots of models and playing around with liquid photographic emulsions and stuff. I didn’t get very far, and having just dug out some of the stuff, it was probably just as well, but it’s still there. Tucked away in the back of my mind as something on the eternal to-do list.

Nowadays, it’s the playfulness with scale and perception in my work that you can attribute to my passion for Carroll’s work. And the chance encounter aspect. Oh, and the multi-layered bit. Well, that and the photography obviously….

Probably the most influential artist of all time?