The following is the catalogue text by Tom Flynn for the 2012 Leicester University sculpture display at the Harold Martin Botanical Gardens in Leicester.
"May you live in interesting times" — The ancient Chinese proverb is traditionally considered a curse rather than a blessing and thus provided a timely and thought-provoking theme for this year's University of Leicester sculpture display (which closes on 28 October).
Curated by British artist
Almuth Tebbenhoff, the participating artists responded with great imagination, some interpreting the theme to reflect on interesting events or imagery that has influenced their work, others using it as a trigger for more acerbic commentary on the current state of the world in which we live. All, however, contributed work that is rich in allusion and metaphor, while leaving space for critical interpretation on the part of the viewer.
Few would doubt that we are indeed living in interesting times, although whether the conditions of the present historical moment are negatively interesting in the ancient Chinese sense or merely evidence of a significant transition in human affairs will surely depend on one's philosophical bias. Uncertainty is always interesting. As that other visionary philosopher, Donald Rumsfeld, once remarked, "There are known knowns; and we know there are known unknowns; but there are also unknown unknowns…there are things we do not know we don't know." This obscure utterance was surely designed to foreclose moral inquiry, and I quote it here for good reason (how often has Rumsfeld made it into a sculpture catalogue?). It neatly encapsulates the opaque networks of power that in large part have led to our current predicament. With Europe teetering on the brink of an economic abyss, one senses a steady if invisible multiplication of the "things we do not know we don't know." Yet was it ever any different?
One thing we do know is that despite the failure of governments to rein in the more malevolent aspects of late capitalism, and notwithstanding the creeping financialisation of the art market, it is the individual artist who, through his or her gift, still offers the hope of replacing the curse with a blessing. Bankers, politicians and billionaire speculators are often considered the main architects of the present questionable state of affairs, but our own rampant commodity fetishism and the steady descent into the miasma of social networking have also helped create these 'interesting times'.
Ever sensitive to the Zeitgeist, sculptor Almuth Tebbenhoff has curated a selection of works that are wide-ranging in approach and subject matter. There is great beauty here — often achieved through the transformation of diverse materials and the imaginative exploration of form through skill and craftsmanship. But there is also evidence of a different sort of commitment — a faith in the capacity of sculpture to take us to places in our minds that would not be accessible by other means. Some of these works will sooth and reassure at a time when reassurance might seem in short supply; and many of the works here will pull you up short, prod you and make you think. If there was an overriding curatorial intention — or perhaps aspiration would be a better word — it was that the collective ambience would be sharp-edged and savoury, idiosyncratic and surprising. In the event it turns out to be all of these and more.
The UK is particularly rich in sculpture parks, albeit of somewhat uneven quality. These rural kunsthalles come into their own in the summer months, offering an escape from the urban grind and a chance to see how sculpture interacts with the landscape. It is always a tricky relationship to manage. The annual Leicester exhibition provides an opportunity to make a few emphatic interventions into a quintessentially English garden and the University of Leicester's exhibition team are again to be applauded for their creative and open-minded approach.
The Arts and Crafts atmosphere of the houses and grounds is a tempting prospect for an adventurous curator. James Stockdale Harrison's (1874-1952) four handsome Edwardian houses sit in a landscape of comforting domesticity — neat beds, rolling lawns, and trimmed hedges. It would be easy for the University to adopt an over-protective stance towards the botanic gardens and surrounding estate, but experience shows that the site is robust enough to embrace even the most assertive installations. Some sculptures take to this environment with ease, entering into a harmonious dialogue with the surrounding trees and walkways. Other works are more disobedient, challenging nature's authority with a certain urban brashness. It is the contrasts between these various encounters that make this year's display so memorable.
The Harold Martin gardens are a social space. The grounds are open to the public, while the houses, once occupied by members of the Leicester gentry, are now halls of residence for university students. It's hard to imagine a more sympathetic environment in which to study.
Soon after entering the garden you may encounter
Mary Bourne's Gathering Dishes lying beneath the trees. The gentle concavity of these sandstone discs is just sufficient to contain the ambient vegetation that might fall from the trees above or, (given that this is England), capture the gentle rain that droppeth from the sky upon the place beneath. Poised between the purely sculptural and the practical function of collecting and gathering, Bourne's dishes hint at a mythic event long past — a dryads' déjeuner sur l'herbe, perhaps, or some archaic ritual of which these receptacles are the surviving material evidence. The soft buff colour of the Clashach sandstone from which the dishes are made also connotes something of the classical past. One might not have been surprised to unearth them during an archaeological dig on a Greek island. The Clashach quarries on the Moray Firth coast of Scotland (where Bourne lives and works) were offering up their stone in abundance from 1846 until the 1940s — the very period that Stockdale Harrison was designing the houses in these grounds. That is a happy coincidence; it also prompts a deeper contemplation of materials and the cyclical nature of landscape.
Bourne's practice constitutes an ongoing meditation on geological time. Her use of stone allows for a direct connection with the earth and its changing patterns and visual rhythms. The work entitled
Regeneration, located here not far from her sandstone dishes, is a simple arrangement of burnished black granite 'buds' peeping up from the ground. Small variations in the size of the stone elements impart a sense of slow organic movement, as if a deep seam of granite were poised to bloom. A symbol of optimistic growth? Or fleurs du mal? Bourne herself has commented, "The past may be known and the future in doubt, but the appearance of both can change when viewed through different emotional filters. Uncertainty and challenge belong in our lives as much as the capacity to perceive beauty and experience hope."
Halima Cassell's work is concerned with surface patterning in the buildings and objects around us and how, when geometrical designs are cut into natural materials they have the propensity to structurally alter the underlying form. She seeks what she describes as "dynamic tension" in the patterns she creates by manipulating the planes and facets integral to the work. "The stresses that this creates help me to achieve the maximum impact within the overall design and also to push the boundaries of the material to its limits."
The relationship between surface and internal structure has been a core preoccupation of sculpture since antiquity and has been rehearsed in the art and artefacts of many cultures. Refracted through the prism of her Anglo-Asian roots (Cassell was born in Pakistan, raised in Manchester and lives in Blackburn, Lancashire), her fascination with architectural geometry, Islamic design and African patterning techniques has inspired a body of work that is rich in historical references and cross-cultural inflections. In the bronze work entitled
Crystalline Tower, three stacked circular forms have been partially hollowed out and their interior and external surfaces enlivened by fan-shaped incisions. The inside of the concave discs are vaguely suggestive of the vaulted ceilings in Gothic cathedrals or folds of drapery, but the work also hints at shapes and patterns normally associated with cell biology or astronomy. Cassell's technical interventions have infused these simple circular forms with a powerful dynamic energy.
A similar approach can be seen in her piece entitled
Full Fathom in hand-carved, unglazed clay. Here the deep planar cutting results in a surface bristling with complex interlocking surfaces that evoke origami paper-folding or ice crystals under a microscope. The title — and the sense of an internal force about to break and roll — prompts thoughts of a marine swell, or perhaps, (given its snug seating within a stone base) a coral form lying on the seabed.
Much of Cassell's work seems to draw on the structural correspondence between patterns found in science and nature and which are imprinted on our shared cultural imagination. Down through history, we have brought these fractal forms into our built environments and onto the surfaces of the objects with which we surround ourselves. We derive pleasure from the tactile skin of the material world and Cassell's sculpture beckons us towards a bodily interaction with pattern and shape. Her tall pillar called
Fan Construction in cold cast iron mimics the sort of carved wood column that might support an ancient Eastern temple, its surface patinated by centuries of human touch. Architectural columns are, of course, genealogically related to trees and the crisp fan-shaped panels decorating the surface of this piece rhyme with the bark of an exotic species. Meanwhile, the three brick and steel elements of
Sacred Conversation borrow a term from art history traditionally used to describe a grouping of figures in a painting or sculpture — often the Virgin and Child flanked by saints. The surface patterning used here — ovolo mouldings, stylised palmettes, and a strange 'saddle'-like form on the upper surface — although seemingly influenced by familiar ornamental motifs, add up to an idiosyncratic formal grammar of Cassell's own invention. Another work in brick clay —
Thistle Head — looks entirely at home here in the botanic gardens. It reminds us of the interconnectedness of art and the natural world identified, most notably, by the German biologist Ernst Haeckel in his great opus of the 1870s:
Kunst Formen der Natur (Art Forms in Nature).
The work of
Ann Christopher is grounded in an exacting approach to every aspect of sculpture, from her original embodiment of the idea or concept in material form in the studio, right through to the complex technical processes of the bronze foundry that give the work its final identity. Her meticulous attention to detail, results in objects of extraordinary beauty and precision, the inspiration for which is drawn from her visual memory. The work included here — a totemic bronze entitled
Line from Three Journeys — resulted from three separate visual experiences, which Christopher remembers as, "the curved trunk of a young birch tree in my parents' garden, the strata and rock pools from a beach on the Isle of Skye, and the powerful shape of the City Corp building — a skyscraper in New York — all visited within a year." Only on completing the work did she realise that it represented "an amalgamation of my interesting times in those places." There is also a faint echo of a disintegrating classicism about this work, which inadvertently makes for a wry comment on an 'interesting' shift in the global axis in recent times from the hegemony of Mediterranean culture towards the developing world of Asia.
Katherine Gili is represented by three works in the current show —
Angoulȇme, Ripoll and
Serrata, all in forged steel. Over her long career Gili has demonstrated an unswerving commitment to abstraction. Her work reveals the extent to which sculpture, even in its most non-referential and non-representational form, is always in an important sense about the body and the body's dynamic potentialities. Through the objects she makes she seeks to create "a unique and heightened experience of the physical, fully expressed in three dimensional space." The three works included here seem suggestive of bodily movement while eschewing the orthodox vocabulary of figurative sculpture. The spaces formed between the turning, twisting members are as critical in creating a sense of volume as the solid struts and flat surfaces from which the work is created. Those spaces go on forever. We're apt to forget that what connects us so intimately and corporeally to sculpture, whether it be abstract or representational in form, is its three-dimensional occupation of the same space we ourselves inhabit. That is at the core of our deep identification with sculpture in all its forms. Strangely, although motionless, Gili's lively compositions seem to writhe in the air.
Serrata has an acrobatic energy, while
Ripoll is more than a little reminiscent of the great marble Laocoön — Neptune one of the most famous and influential works of antiquity.
The work of
Jessica Harrison aims to "reinforce emotional pathways between external sensual communications and internal experiences" and her recent excursion into stone is an important factor in realising that aspiration. The piece entitled
The Fold draws on her awareness of stone as "a material made up of millions of layers of skin through which run veins, fractures and vibration, a living thing that has grown through immense compression, as susceptible and fragile to the changing environment as we are." The approach she has taken might be read as a genuflection to her material's antiquity, endowing this massive slab of Kilkenny limestone with fleshy folds. The result could be a fragment of a colossal antique statue of a corpulent god or a fossilised mastodon dug from the ice. More importantly Harrison has imparted a sensuality to this material that stems from our immediate identification with its corporeality. It is a profoundly sculptural object that speaks to our most distant ancestry.
For many European citizens, the 'interesting times' still unfolding will be regarded as interesting for all the wrong reasons. For Greeks, Spaniards, the Irish, and countless others here in the UK too, the economic downturn is not just mildly discombobulating, but represents the world turned upside down. While
Sean Henry's work has never sought to offer topical political commentary, it takes on a wry new significance in this context. Henry's interest in 'realist' sculpture can be traced back to his discovery, during an extended European study trip, of the polychrome saints that populate churches and cathedrals in Italy, Spain and elsewhere. He subsequently used that knowledge and experience to fashion his own vocabulary of representation which gains much of its power not only from the bodily realism at which he is now highly skilled, but from the psychological intensity he imparts to his figures. It is one thing to make a sculpture that looks like a human figure, but to make that figure appear to be thinking is an altogether different thing. Henry's sculptures are not realist in the photographic sense; his figures are often marginally larger or smaller than human scale and their surfaces speak of their origins as made things. Yet somehow they emanate something very close to a human presence.
Walking Man strides forward with a fierce and self-contained sense of purpose, eyes fixed on the path ahead. One would hesitate to interrupt this figure's determined progress along that line.
Man With Potential Selves (III), meanwhile, might have hypnotised himself into a parallel, horizontal universe. He floats before us, barefoot, hand casually on hip, seemingly meditating on an alternative reality. He is dressed in artisanal clothes — a donkey jacket and combat trousers, suspended in a dreamlike state, contemplating what? — our interesting times, perhaps?
Even between its annual sculpture displays, the visual pleasures of the botanic gardens are numerous and varied. There is an abundance of rare and exotic plants and trees to be enjoyed here, many of which have sculptural characteristics of their own.
Simon Hitchens' work integrates itself into this natural arena with consummate ease. His interest in materials and the relationships between different surfaces and textures can be seen in the work entitled In the
Eye of the Beholder — a striking encounter between a limestone monolith and the mirrored surface of a stainless steel screen. The relationship between the two elements is enriched by the colour of the garden vegetation reflected in the screen. The reflection enriches our visual experience of the work as we move around it and see ourselves and our surroundings incorporated into the work. Through its elegant formal economy, Hitchens' sculpture enhances our emotional response to the shape and texture of materials.
One of the few works to ponder the animal kingdom in this year's exhibition is
Brigitte Jurack's Glizzit, a small flock of brass-covered decoy pigeons. Today, outside the specialised world of pigeon-fancying and pigeon-training, pigeons are likely to be treated as something of a menace. The feral variety continues to test the patience of municipal authorities wherever these birds appear in any number. Thus it is easy to overlook the enduring symbolic significance of the pigeon or dove (or, more properly, birds of the family Columbidae), from the dove sent out by Noah to the emblem of peace designed by Picasso in 1949 (Picasso's daughter Paloma was named after the Spanish word for dove). Jurack's delightful work restores some of the emblematic value of these birds through the simple expediency of bedizening some plastic decoy models with brass leaf. She quotes from psalm 68 — "When flying in the sunlight, their wings looked like silver and their plumage like gold" — and invites us to imagine this small flock taking to the air above Leicester, lit by the evening sun.
Jurack is also the creator of one of the more oblique comments on the 'Interesting Times' theme of this year's display. We are often told that the world is now run by economists. One of the ways they like to express themselves is through the simplifying graphic language of the pie chart. Jurack's ceramic work entitled
Distribution of Wealth transposes the economist's power point presentation into sculptural form, presenting us with a pie evenly distributed (reality, needless to say, is rarely so equitable). As she reminds us, it also evokes the colourful wooden building blocks designed by Friedrich Froebel (1782-1852), which subsequently became a staple of creative play in the kindergarten. Here it takes on a new sculptural significance. "The undulated surface reflects the subtle changes of light in a quiet voice," Jurack explains. "Here the wealth of potentiality depends on levels of daylight, humidity and viewpoint. As such the sculpture mimics the surface of water rather than that of a pie chart."
The curator of this year's Leicester sculpture display,
Almuth Tebbenhoff, works across a range of materials and techniques. She is skilled in clay modelling, marble carving and welding in steel. Her own contribution to the exhibition, the painted steel work entitled
Open Pillar, comprises four vertical, angled steel ribbons, united at their bases by diagonal cross-members. There is a quivering uncertainty to these lines drawn in space. They rise into the air, terminating at a point high above our heads, but the imagination extends them up and on to infinity. It might function here as an apt visual metaphor for our precarious times. Tebbenhoff describes the work as "a container for a most precious substance — ‘Nothingness’."
It is always exciting at outdoor sculpture exhibitions to come across one or two works that have been hewn from the mountain and worked with human hands into startling new forms. Few things are more visually rewarding than seeing a recalcitrant material like marble yield to the sculptor's creative energy. This year,
Alena Matejka's Wall of Wind is an example of that process. An imposing slab of Carrara marble has been carved with diagonal bands of cross-woven ribbons to form a lattice-work screen, each intersection pierced to form an irregular aperture. Matejka worked her
Wall of Wind in the Tuscan town of Pietrasanta where artists have been carving marble since the Renaissance, collaborating with local artisan craftsmen to bring stone from the surrounding quarries before transforming it in the studio. Here Matejka has used a range of drilling and carving techniques to give the stone a pillowy softness that belies its true weight and mass. It recalls the elaborate screens made for Italian churches of the Byzantine Empire that used interlaced strapwork and other forms of decorative abstraction. The unfinished edges of the slab create a sense of it being a fragment from a much larger panel, although how large is left to our imagination.
The work of
Eilis O'Connell is also rooted in a keen instinct for sculpture's core preoccupations with shape, volume, mass, the relationship between interior and exterior, and so on. The piece she has contributed here —
Carapace, in stainless steel and hand-woven stainless steel cable — while visually pleasing from any angle, nevertheless invites us to walk a circle around it in order to comprehend its shape and volume. Even then, however, like a Möbius strip whose one continuous flat surface swings back upon itself through three dimensions, neither end nor beginning are clearly assimilable but rather all of a piece. It's hard to conceive of a more succinct way of visualising the mystery of human life than this strange, shimmering pod.
One of the most enriching aspects of this year's display is its wealth of unfamiliar materials.
Atsuo Okamoto's Forest Planet 1 & 2 — two bizarre biomorphic objects formed from basalt glacial erratic boulders — seem part rock and part calcified animal organ. From their pierced, pitted surfaces sprout truncated tubular tendrils vaguely suggestive of veins or arteries. Okamoto's principal concern is with the natural integrity of stone and with the relationship of stone to the human and geographic environment. The erratic boulders used here probably originated from ice flows crossing Scotland millions of years ago. Their deep antiquity allows Okamoto to meditate on universal concepts of space and time. His boulders might have landed here from a distant planet. "A star is a perfect, strong shape with its unique personality and simultaneously natural form," he says. "Although solid, the centre connects with its surrounding universe. It is like a sphere yet not a geometric sphere. I work on ‘my star’ with these shapes in mind."
Keith Rand has carved his own personal sculptural language using wood in combination with paint and other materials.
Witness — a sinuous, free-standing vertical form in oak, lead and rusted copper on a slate stone base — has a numinous presence, hovering in the threshold zone between a natural form and a made thing. The extraordinary care he bestows upon his materials lends his sculpture a kind of priestly majesty.
Witness is a welcoming and tactile totem whose verticality prompts us to read it as a body of sorts and yet it retains a contradictory otherness that marks a boundary that cannot be crossed.
Not everything in this year's exhibition immediately announces itself as sculpture, but that will make discovery all the more rewarding. The work submitted by
Mikey Georgeson and
Paul Tecklenberg is nestling in plain sight. Their
Avian Intelligence is a series of small bird boxes dispersed around the botanic gardens and whose real purpose will only be discovered on close examination. Georgeson and Tecklenberg have responded to this year's theme with dry wit. The work requires us to suspend the restraint that might normally keep us at a respectful distance from a bird's little wooden house. On peering through the hole we won't spy a nestling tit, but rather a photographic image that overlays views of London with views of Doha, the capital Qatar, currently laying muscular claim to become the cultural capital of the Gulf States. We are already in interesting times, but Qatar's thrusting effort to switch the geopolitical axis will make matters more interesting still.
Recent economic developments have come, for many, like a bolt from the blue, upsetting what seemed like the natural order of things. As human beings we crave equilibrium and the lack of it tends to be interesting in all the wrong ways.
Richard Trupp's The Juggernaut of Nought provides an emphatic interruption to the bucolic tranquillity of the botanic gardens. Trupp's work is as architectural in its intentions as it is sculptural. His welded steel wedge (he makes these massive things in his studio) draws much of its punctuating power from its relation to the nearby buildings. It is a compelling installation, for while (while remove) this juggernaut's direction of travel seems clear enough, we can only ponder the forces that might have propelled it here. Just thank your lucky stars you weren't lying on the lawn reading Proust when it landed.
Nick Turvey can always be relied upon to pick up the gauntlet whenever it is thrown with conviction. His response to the brief is arguably the most direct and uncompromising and is all the more stimulating for that. Both his installations here —
Everything is under control and
Doing what has to be done — draw on the visual rhetoric of stealth and prohibition that seems to define much of what is done in our name. Both works symbolise a dialectic of power and powerlessness, of reassurance and doubt. Turvey's current work is also informed by a concern with a broader creative project that seeks to make 'sculpture' that is immersive and which engages the viewer through social means rather than through more conventional modes of communication. "My question is: how to make reality rather than representation or abstraction, activating physical and social space, in scenarios that include the audience?"
In his bronze
Emperor,
William Tucker draws on the ancient tradition of colossal statues, fragments of which are integral to the object landscape of many cultures, particularly in the Mediterranean (the colossal head of the emperor Constantine, familiar to visitors to the Capitoline Museum in Rome, has intimidated artists since the Renaissance). The extent to which we have absorbed that long tradition into our common visual sensibility is tested in Tucker's work. Some visitors to the botanic gardens will wander past Emperor and mistake it as a work of pure abstraction. Others taking the time to encircle it and peruse its contours are more likely to unlock its visual codes. Cybele — the ancient Phrygian earth mother, worshipped in antiquity in the form of a sacred stone, looks similarly at home here, reminding us of the chthonic lineage of all sculpture.
The sculpture of
David Worthington is rooted in a deep respect for stone. The forms he imparts to his work often evolve from his research into the materials, their regional origin and their mythical and cultural resonances. The work he is showing here — entitled
Black Sun — is made from a stone called dolorite from Clee Hill near Ludlow in Shropshire. Worthington discovered a certain occult significance to the location (which appears in the Mappa Mundi) and which has generated local legends of witchcraft and magic. Dolorite — known in Shropshire as Dhustone — is the same igneous rock of which the earth's core is formed. On polishing it assumes a dazzling black shine — hence Worthington's title. The notion of a black sun provides another fitting image for an exhibition seeking poetic responses to interesting times.
