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?

Here today, here tomorrow

A couple of years ago I was asked to run some workshops for the Lake District National Park Authority as part of their ‘Excellence in Design’ programme. It was a bold and fascinating project which sought to explore what is good design, how it works in the context of the Lake District and inform a review of the planning guidelines to see if there was a way to encourage excellent design in the National Park. My own workshops were about colour – an exploration of it within a variety of landscapes. Not to dictate what are good colours and what are bad ones, but simply to give planners, architects and decision makers the experience of colour so they could see for themselves how it works. It was a fun couple of days and we mostly played around with lots of things outdoors.

photo: Andrew Tunnard

For the past seven or eight years I’ve done a big installation somewhere in the lakes every year. I like doing stuff in the Lake District. Although I live over an hour from most of the lakes, I know it well enough to find locations which work well for me.  It’s not as impressive as the Alps, or even the Highlands for that matter, but its compact size makes it easy to get round and from an audience point of view, easy to get to.

The cultural heritage or the Lake District intrigues me too. Not just the romantic poets stuff, but the pull it had for outsiders and radical thinkers of all persuasions. That it still manages to pull 16 million visitors a year is part of it too. The original tourist destination. It may be a man-made landscape ripping off the tourists on every corner, but it’s been like that for a good couple of hundred years now but that’s part of the charm.

I haven’t done a piece in the lakes at all this year. Not for any conscious decision - it’s just turned out that way. However, next year there looks like being at least two new big pieces there, so I guess it’s swings and roundabouts.

Back in August I was asked to write an article for the RIBA magazine in the north west about working in the protected landscapes of the Lakes. I wasn’t sure about what they wanted from me so I wrote a couple of different articles and let the choose the one they wanted. I said I’d probably use the unwanted one as a blog post, but having looked at it, I think they chose the right one (the other one was even more pants). For what it’s worth, here’s the article:

…

I have been creating works with the Lake District landscape for the best part of 10 years now. I guess I’m lucky in that I’m based not too far away from the Lakes so I know it fairly well.

Most of my work deals with landscape and trying to understand all its detail – from the shape of the skyline to the way the light falls off a leaf at a certain time of year. Landscapes are therefore one of the essential raw materials and there’s plenty of it in the Lakes. But it’s not just the abundance of interesting views, it’s more than that. It’s about the cultural history of the place, the people, the way the land has been used over the centuries and the marks that have been left behind.

The Lake District, as much as most landscapes in England, has been shaped by its use over hundreds of years. There’s always something very man-made about the way it looks today. Iron age settlers used the fells and water for hunting and fishing. The Vikings brought a more formal sense of agriculture and found out about the metals in the hills – copper, iron, lead, silver and gold. The Romans built their walls and towns. The landscape was deforested to build ships and the now barred fields enclosed with miles and miles of neat dry stone walls. Then came the artists and poets and dreamers, and with them a new appreciation of the aesthetics of landscape. But then that visual story creaks to a final stop with the establishment of the National Parks in the 1950‘s. The 20^th Century was preoccupied trying to protect and preserve the landscape as is some museum exhibit. The side effect being that in the visual story of the landscape its as if the 20^th Century never existed. Both art and architecture in the lakes has retreated to a mostly ineffectual pastiche of the past.

This is  potentially damaging shortsighted effect. In the interests of preserving the heritage and history of the Lakes, we need to be more aware that what we do today will be the heritage of tomorrow. To do that we need to be more confident about the marks we make. Mediocrity and subtlety will do nothing for future generations. All great art was contemporary when it was created. It’s part of what makes them great.

The installations that I create are always temporary – a once-upon-a-time-and-never-again. The legacy of them, however is one of changing the way people view and experience the landscape. One hopeful side effect of these is a growing recognition of the role that ambitious art and design can play in shaping the landscape of the future.

white walls and woodlands

Yesterday the sun came out for a glimpse of early autumn light. It’s my favourite sort of light – warm and comforting. The sun just easing itself down as though the summer’s efforts have made it weary. The uniform greens and blues burst open to a much broader pallette of yellows and golds and russetts. The shadows gradually lengthen and reveal texture and contours in the landscape.

With just a day’s window of sunshine for a week or so I took the chance to venture down to the woods at the bottom of the hill and indulge myself in some photography. We’d done a small test of a larger installation piece a couple of weeks before and it’d been hanging in the studio ever since. It’s from a piece I’m creating for a trade stand in Monaco for a local paper manufacturer. The final piece is a much larger installation made from around 3,000 die-cut pieces of paper. On the stand it’ll be within the clean lines and pure white walls of a gallery area.

The piece – ‘Pinched’ – is based on a form created by imagining a ceiling surface pinched and pulled to the ground. I imagined a form created from a skin of nylon tights. (Don’t ask!)  Rather than a piece which stands on the ground and reaches for the sky, I wanted to do something which starts as a roof and encreoaches into the space below. It’s touch by the time it reaches the ground is light and barely there. Yet at the same time it has a tension which eminates from a tiny point on the ground. The thought that if that point were severed the whole piece would just spring back up to a flat plane on the ceiling again.

There’s something elemental about paper. It’s essentially just wood and water, with the water taken out. It’s easy to recycle and just as easy to rot back into soil, as wood and other plant stuff do. So in some tenuous way, it’s just borrowed stuff. I also love the way the decaying process sustains an entire existence of its own in moss and lichen. Themselves all part of the process of returning stuff to the ground.

Earlier in the year I made two paper installations inspired by these and the elements of wood and water:

TreeCreeper #1

TreeCreeper #2

While photographing the first ‘Treecreeper’ piece, I was also struck by the way it seemed to come alive in the gently shifting light from the tree canopy.

It’s this kind of thing which adds to the experience of work in the landscape. The way that nature’s penchant for chaos ensures the work is constantly changing – from the movement of light, to the way the ground moves under your feet. So I’m always looking for ways to bring some of those extras to the white cube gallery space. A couple of years ago it was a mud and clay floor in an installation at Scope International Art Fair in London.

This year it’s the gently moving dappled light I’m attempting to export. A bank of computer-controlled LED lights randomly shift the shadows ever-so slightly in a very subtle kind of way.  Next week in a grand exhibition hall overlooking the boats in Monaco I’ll be bringing a little bit of my secret woodland magic with me. But before then, I just wanted to indulge myself in my own world and bring the piece (albeit only the bottom section) back to the woods. And there, just like the other pieces, it’ll stay to be reclaimed by time. Pieces borrowed and duly returned.

Spires

It’s been a really busy few weeks in the studio lately. We seem to be shipping out a new installation every week at the moment. I’ve hardly had a spare second to sit down and think. So a bit of a quick post this one.

Spires. They seem to have been the big chunk of my year so far, so here’s the story.

SevenSpires was a half-mile long installation in the Oxford Canal around the Northamptonshire village of Braunston. Seven red spires, each standing over four metres above the water follow the meandering line of the canal, their form echoing that of All Saints Church in the village above.

It started earlier on in the year when I had to find a location on the canal network in Northamptonshire for the installation. The original proposal was fr the River Nene on the other side of the county, but things were getting complicated there and I had to have a piece in for August. I walked the best part of 30 miles of towpath looking for a spot where the canal said something about the landscape and the piece would fit in a meaningful way.

I first came across the location late one afternoon when the sun was lowering in the sky and picking out the shapes in the undulating hills. The site was perfect: a nice long curve with bridges at either end for a higher view point. From the Warwickshire end the church dominated the skyline. Then there was the all the canal history right there in the marina, and the beautiful junction roving bridge, and lots of great pubs.

The on the outside of the curve the bank had eroded quite significantly leading to the illusion of a wide stretch of canal. The eroded bit was only about a foot deep. This meant I could place the spires on the bed of the cut without encroaching on the navigation channel. At only a foot deep it also meant that the spires would be safe from even the most novice of boater.

installing the last spire. (pic courtesy Beckie Sewell)

The spires were constructed out of marine ply, engineered by local (to me) designers FoskettHylton. The pieces were cut on CNC router in Kendal and finished by hand in my studio. The red fabric – a waterproof nylon that I knew held the colour – was laser cut for precision and to maintain crisp lines and laboriously sewn up on my ageing machine. The whole structure then sat on a steel basket (fabricated by Les Harrison in Penrith) which held 100kg of concrete ballast.

As a last minute thing, it was suggested the spires could light up at night. THis was done using a couple of LED spot lights mounted halfway up inside and powered by a solar panel on the bank. The illumination was more of a glow, but as it happened, they still looked quite impressive after dark.

Despite its simplicity, I think it’s quite difficult to describe SevenSpires and how it works. It certainly looks effortless – a line of big red triangles in the canal. They certainly got photographed. A lot.

However, the reason they got photographed a lot is because they looked good on camera.  A quick trawl through Flickr and you start to discover some of the tricks. Call me old fashioned but I’m a big fan of composition and like it or not, composition can make or break an image. What worked best for me at Braunston was the strength of the sightlines. Those great angles which present themselves to even the most basic of photographer. The way the red stands out against the green backdrop is only part of it. The alignments of spires, the reflections, the echo of the church on the hill, the framing of the bridges. Little compositional tricks which seem to reveal themselves as you walk along the towpath. The sense of reveal – you typically only saw three spires at a time – was even stronger when travelling through them on a boat.

That was all the planned stuff. That’s what I wanted it to do, and I’m chuffed that’s how so many people experienced them – as things to make the photos look good. But tere were other things too. THings I half expected but which worked far better than I imagined. These were the subtle bits. The bits which don’t photograph well. The way they sat as perfect gepmetric shapes in a very organic landscape. The way the described the line of the canal from a distance when you couldn’t even see there was a canal. They had a very distinct presence about them and one which made the landscape feel very empty after they were taken out.

But best of all was the light! Come 7pm every evening, the sun dipped below the clouds and even on the dullest day there was this amazing evening light which just lit up the spires and threw those long shadows across the ridge and furrow fields. For about 20 minutes a day it was purely magical.

the architecture of art

So back to my Grand Tour idea…

My interest in the Grand Tour I guess stems back to a piece I made in the Lake District back in 2008. ‘Drop’ was a giant, reflective inflatable raindrop  which was designed to tour specific locations in the Lakes. It was commissioned by Cumbria Tourism – the tourist board for the region – to launch a ‘Cultural Tourism’ campaign. Through my research I discovered that in fact the Lake District was a cultural destination long before the invention of Gortex. In the 18th Century Thomas West created the UK’s first tourist guide as an alternative to the Grand Tour – most of which had come to a grinding halt due to Napoleon’s cannonballs all over Europe. In his book ‘A Guide to the Lakes’ of 1779, he not only talks of the many Roman sites in the county, but also about the diversity of architecture, and controversially for the time – how it works within the landscape. He talks of the bold contemporary mansion on Belle Isle (we’d call it Palladian today) and the character of a variety of architectural styles making up the village of Ambleside, nestling on the side of the fells.

For all sorts of reasons, ‘Drop’ ended up as an inflatable artwork. I’d done a number of inflatable pieces in the past – all reasonably large  - but this was by far the largest. As a piece within the landscape, designed to reflect the landscape, it had to stand at an appropriate scale with the landscape.

It was the size of a three storey building and standing inside while it was being deflated was quite incredible.

So started my interest in the Grand Tour, and a return to Paris – the traditional starting point for English tourists.

For this year’s Monumenta at the Grande Palais in Paris (a bit like the Tate Modern Turbine Hall series), Anish Kapoor  created ‘Leviathan’. An enormous inflatable sculpture which practically fills the entire space. All seemed a little familiar, so was top of my list of things to see.

It’s a huge, shiny inflatable.

It was reassuring to note it was constructed in exactly the same way as ‘Drop’ – sewn seams – and in the same type of material. The inside space had the same acoustics - a weird type of spring reverb, but without being too lively to make it all chaotic sounding. By using a red coloured substrate to the fabric, the inside had a very strong coloured glow – even though the outside looks smooth and opaque.

Outside, the scale really becomes apparent. It’s easily twice as high as Drop, and with three bulbous ends filling the nave.

For me though, the strength was in the way it not only explored the entire three dimensional space of the building, but the way the amazing architecture of the Grand Palais became a far bigger player in itself.

There was something even a little steam punk about the juxtaposition between the sleek, flawless and flowing contours of the artwork and the ornate fin de siecle cast-ironwork of the building. Like some illustration to a Philip Pullman novel.

It was good to see just how many of the thousands of visitors were taking picture as much of the building as the artwork. That for me was the real success of the piece.

Within my own work it’s all about location, location, location. If you’re going to play with an environment, it someties (but not always) helps if it’s a great environment in the first place.

On a completely different scale, across the road (literally), was another architecture and landscape work by Charlotte Perriand.

It’s a bit lost against Charles Girault’s Petit Palais, and elevated above head-height. Still, it wasn’t designed to be there. Instead this is one of a number of temporary shelters the designer / photographer created for mountaineers in the Alps in the 1930′s.

Perriand was a designer and photographer who created some fantastic bodies of work in both disciplines. It was particularly good to see themes crossing over between photography and furniture design. At the root of her work though, was an observation of nature and landscape. It was long walks through the landscape of the Alps which fascinated her more than anything, and led to a series of temporary hotels and walkers refuges.

Refuge Tonneau is a lightweight shelter made from modular parts which was easy to assemble and slept 8 people.

from a wonderful blog featuring some other rural art installations

There’s a good article here on the refuge Tonneau including a video of the transportation and construction of a replica a couple of years ago.

Over at the other end of town was another architectural battle. This time between two contemporary heavyweights: Jean Nouvel and Zaha Hadid.

Nouvel’s Institute du Monde Arab is stunning. Here is a western architect not just understanding but playing with Islamic design. From the outside it appears to be some middle-eastern inspired fretwork. The twist however is that these are not just decorative. Each element of the pattern is in fact an automated iris – like those found in camera lenses – which were designed to open and close in reaction to sunlight. OK, so light all big tech, it doesn’t work properly anymore- but the idea is nice.

The main archive at the other end of the building is a beautiful never-ending library which spirals up nine storeys without stairs. This is why Nouvel is perhaps the darling architect of Paris. There’s at least another half-dozen galleries and institutes by him in the city, and he’s appeared in a previous blog post And yet, for a few months it plays host to a pavilion by Zaha Hadid.

The Chanel Mobile Art Pavilion is a curvaceous, organic carbon fibre pod unlike anything else. It has no front, back or sides, instead you enter in through a slice along one edge. Still conforming to Islamic tradition, Hadid takes another direction in her influence of nature without replicating images of living things. Like some squishy flying saucer from the outside, inside it’s all spider’s webs and tree limbs. It’s an exoskeleton – the structural elements being the outside skin. The exhibition inside the pavilion takes you through a journey to understand where Hadid is going with all this. In it she talks about creating a new form of organic architecture. Actually, a lot of things are said inside…

(cough)

Like Perriand’s Refuge Tonneau, and even ‘Drop’, this pavilion was designed with portability in mind, although I dread to think how many Stobart lorries it takes to move all the bits.

Again, there’s a lovely dialogue going on between the two buildings.

Buildings?

Somehow that doesn’t seem the right word. I think, what all of these pieces make me realise is that the line between architecture and art is increasingly blurred. A few years back I wrote somewhere about the changing roles of art,  fashion and architecture. For a long time art was where you went to to get an emotion response – if you wanted something to move you – make you smile, fall in love, cry. Whatever. Over the past decade there’s been an interesting change. Art is becoming more intellectually challenging – looking in on itself. Questioning its role – there’s more ideas-based work, more process-based work. Meanwhile the quest for something to move us – make us gasp in awe and wonder and revel in its beauty is increasingly being served by fashion and architecture.

I’m aware that my own work is becoming more architectural too. Although that conclusion is more down to the response from my structural engineers than anything else.

When I’m in the beginning stages of a piece, I like to try and isolate myself from what’s going on in other art. I don’t go to galleries, read book on other artists. I try to draw inspiration from the research facts and the site itself. Sure I can’t undo the knowledge I have of other artworks, but part of working in a remote place is the ability to cut off from the art world and do my own thing. So what’s nice to do afterwards, is to go and see other stuff that’s come from the same place as my thinking. Call them retro-influences. Inspiration after the event. They reassure me I’m not alone.

life in mono

I’ve just returned from a few days in Paris. It wasn’t really a holiday – I went for business for something I’m not allowed to tell you about yet – but I admit I did stay an extra night for wandering and recharging the cultural batteries. I have a bit of a thing about the Grand Tour – it’s been the reason behind at least three recent commissions – and I’ve an idea to explore the greater Tour to see if it’s still relevant to contemporary art and architecture. Still, it’s no surprise Paris was the stepping off point for this great art and architecture adventure. It still seeps culture at every corner and is certainly the bedstone of the city.

I love Paris.

It’s an affair that started many years ago – and I was more than a little horrified to work out just how many. I started out as a photographer. I did all sorts, but mostly stuff for the music mags and editorial pieces for the broadsheet weekend magazines. My passion for photography in itself was born by the work of the early 20th century French reportage photographers I saw at the Barbican ‘Art or Nature’ exhibition in 1988. From that moment on I was hooked.

Atget’s urban landscapes were haunting, timeless capsules – documents of places and things, often devoid of people. They had a real stillness about them. Unhurried and full of detail – stories hidden in corners and through half-opened doorways.

Jaques-Henri Lartigue did great sweeping panoramas full of blurry atmosphere in glorious widescreen. Cartier-Bresson had a darker view of the seedier side of Paris, Wily Ronis and Robert Doisneau almost owned the genre of what is now known as street photography with volumes of classic and well known studies of people living, laughing, kissing, dancing, yelling playing in the streets.

But most of all for me there was André Kertèsz. He saw the city through strong graphical compositions often abstracting the mundane, everyday into a series of lines and shapes.

…and of course, this one!

Over four or five years, while I was working in a darkroom in London, I would make frequent trips to Paris in search of this light and a desire to capture that spirit in way I could just never do in London. I also had the advantage of working in a specialist photographic lab so processing and printing film, was not only free, but crafting those images in the darkroom – fine-tuning the combination of film type and paper and toners – in search of the timeless quality of those great images.

D'Orsay_Clock (1990)

Street near Pigale (1989)

Paris Metro (1990)

l'actrice (1989) - I loved these stencil works in the Marais district - all a good 15 years before Banksy made his name

So, last week, arriving in Paris with my trusty (now digital) Leica, I found myself switching it to black and white mode and shooting in 35mm full-frame format. With demise of my favourite fim and photographic paper, this was going to be the closest I could get to that experience of my youth.

The Institute Arabe (2011)

Saxaphone Busker on the Metro (2011)

tourists at Notre Dame

It may have been more than a decade since I was last in the city, but it seems in some respects some things change very slowly. Out of the city centre, away from the coach dumping points, there is still chracter and beauty in hidden corners. Glimpses through half-opened doorways and people leading their carefree existence – the joi de vivre.

I may not be a great photographer, and the images may not be the timeless classics of Kertesz or Brassai, but for the first time in over a decade I’ve fallen in love with my camera again.

a story about stories

I love local stories. Everywhere has them. Things happen that for one reason or another people remember them, and tell other people, who tell other people, and so it goes on over time. Sometimes the telling peters out and for whatever reason the story stops getting told and eventually the story dies. Sometimes if the story is lucky it gets written down and lasts a bit longer.

Most of my work is temporary. Some more temporary than others. Obviously I like to document the pieces so there is at least some kind of record, and inevitably other people come and take their own photos too. Some have even painted them. However, I like to think they’ll last longest as memories for the people who experienced them – living on as stories.

My latest piece is a meadow of 1,200 windmills next to Wreay  primary school near Carlisle in Cumbria, UK. It was the result of a period of working with the primary school and seeing what topics they were studying and how they could all come together as a single piece. It all started with a story –  Don Quixote and his tilting at windmills and cascaded down the school from there. It was a lovely piece to do, working with a great little school (only 60 or so kids and fantastic teachers) in such an inspiring village.

St. Mary’s Wreay (opposite the school) is one of those incredible little gems hidden away in the countryside. It was designed and built by Sarah Losh – a local girl who did the grand tour at the start of the 18th century and came back bursting with ideas and a passion for architecture. The village church was falling down, so she designed a new one drawn from all the architectural masterpieces she’d visited. And what she created is something so special. The decoration is incredible – flowers, birds and animals everywhere. The handcrafted nature of the place feels very arts and crafts and yet pre-dates it by over 50 years.

You can find more about Sarah Losh and her church here or here. For me though, the strongest, and most touching aspect was the sense of happiness. Sarah didn’t like death, and here is a church with no symbols or mention of death anywhere. The only crucifix is a plain wooden cross. There is no graveyard outside (it’s a few hundred yards away on the other side of the village) and her own mausoleum is a simple barn-like structure a couple of fields away. And here, it’s that lack of death which makes the story all the more touching. As a memorial to her sister it speaks volumes.

A couple of weeks ago I was shown another, very different but equally touching story on the island of  Öland in Sweden. I was over doing a talk and some work for Yellowbox in Sättra, about the Middle Wood (Mittlandsskogen). One morning we had a drive around this woodland to get a sense of the place. I’d already been taken to an incredible Viking fortified settlement and done a walk with the local ecology officer. It’s a fascinating research project. On the road tour we passed this beautiful house:

Sweden has its own ingrained idea of socialism where it is just not socially acceptable to shout about your wealth, so houses tend to be very modest affairs from the outside. This however wasn’t. Going through a little cast iron gate on the other side of the road we found a non-garden with this:

It’s a concrete model of the house opposite. Beautiful in its own way. And yet, if you peered through one of the glazed upstairs windows there’s this photo in a frame on the wall:

There’s a beautiful story here. It’s not about wealth – there’s obviously something deeper and more touching at hand. The story is sketchy – it may be local, but it isn’t written down really.

Later in the day I was taken to a small, tidy churchyard to see the final piece in the story. A granite headstone of the same house. On the back, the simple quote from the ten commandments: “Do not covet your neighbour’s house”

Inside those three houses is a story of great beauty and love. I don’t think you need to know the details – the story is still there and will doubtless live on, long after the names are forgotten.