The Sculpture Agency in The Times

Sean Henry:
'Conflux' at Salisbury Cathedral

They tell me that newspapers are in crisis and that readerships are falling and that the recent News of the World phone-hacking scandal has left an irreparable dent in the reputation of Fleet Street. But I have to admit that when The Times turns its benevolent eye on one of your projects one does still feel the warm glow that comes with traditional press endorsement.

So a big hooray and thank you to The Times's arts editor Huon Mallalieu who, having received my last newsletter, this morning acknowledged the efforts of The Sculpture Agency to promote contemporary sculpture (The Times page 24). The purpose of The Sculpture Agency is simple. It is to communicate the work of serious contemporary sculptors in an intelligent and critical way to as broad an audience as possible.

I do intend to extend the Agency into a commercial operation as well in the coming weeks by making it possible for sculptors (particularly those with no formal gallery representation) to sell their works online. But the overriding objective is to encourage a more critical awareness of what sculpture is and how the UK is particularly well-endowed with sculptural talent.

As usual, if you're a sculptor and would like your work represented by The Sculpture Agency, please contact me. I can't guarantee that I will accept every application as I exercise a rigorous quality control over the kind of work I include. But all approaches are welcome.

Sean Henry, Italia

Meanwhile The Times piece gave a well-earned nod to Jodie Carey's work at Leighton House Museum, to James Capper's work at Glyndebourne and elsewhere, and to Sean Henry's current exhibition of polychrome figure sculptures at Salisbury Cathedral (above left and right).

Sean's show has been drawing huge crowds to Salisbury Cathedral who clearly find his figures in a variety of scales utterly compelling in this quiet Gothic interior. Sean has invited me to write the text for a catalogue he is producing with Scala publishers to mark the exhibition. I'm very pleased to have accepted as the works look marvellous in a cathedral setting normally reserved for figures of the saints and apostles. If you're heading westwards in the coming weeks, I urge you to stop off in Salisbury and take a look at the show. It's no exaggeration to say that it's one of the most stimulating exhibitions in the country at present.

Watch this space for more news of the catalogue.

Jedd Novatt: The new Chillida?

Jed Novatt, Chaos Pamplona

Jedd Novatt's gravity-challenging sculptures — comprised of open structure piled upon open structure — are getting more and more ambitious, as these images of his recently installed Chaos Pamplona in Napa Valley, California clearly reveal. 

But unlike a lot of contemporary sculpture that is just made big for the sake of being big and in-your-face, Novatt's works carry a freight of implied danger that seems to intensify with the increase in scale.

His large-scale outdoor works are also impressive feats of engineering, yet happily they are feats that remain subtly subordinated to the aesthetic power of the work. 

The death of Spanish artist Eduardo Chillida (1924-2002) left a gaping hole on the horizon of 'proper' sculpture — sculpture that is concerned with those eternally important matters such as scale, volume, structure, balance, the dialectics of internal and external energy, and so on.

Coincidentally, Novatt — an American who lives and works in France — now makes much of his work in Spain. Perhaps unwittingly (but perhaps with conviction also) he is slowly taking up the challenge thrown down by his great Basque predecessor.

Novatt may be the rightful heir to Chillida's crown.

Read my introduction to the catalogue of Novatt's one-man show in 2008 at the Musée d'Art et d'Industrie André Diligent 'La Piscine' in Roubaix, northern France on the Home Page of The Sculpture Agency.

Jodie Carey at the Pump House Gallery, Battersea Park

I spent yesterday scrutinizing exquisite 18th Century Chinese Imperial jade carvings that came up for auction at Duke's saleroom in Dorchester (which I reported on here). I got back to London in time to attend the opening of a new exhibition of work by the hugely talented young British artist Jodie Carey at the Pump House Gallery in Battersea Park (left). It was like going from the sublime to the sublime.

Carey is a proper sculptor. I first saw her work in 2009 at the then new Rick Mather-designed Towner in Eastbourne where she had occupied the gallery's vast second-floor gallery. Her installation, entitled 'In the Eyes of Others', comprised three massive chandeliers suspended from the ceiling, each weighing a tonne and constructed from 9,000 plaster casts of human bones (below right).

On the floor of the darkened gallery, cardboard boxes and stacks of old newspapers had been arranged in piles. The room temperature had been purposely chilled and the chandeliers spotlit to create an unsettling atmosphere.

Jodie Carey In the Eyes of Others

For me it recalled the palaeontology displays in natural history museums, but it also conjured the doomed rococo exuberance of ancien régime France. One imagined oneself walking through the deserted corridors of a Belle Epoque mansion occupied by an invading army long departed. Like the chandeliers — a form of decorative lighting now rarely seen except in stately homes or ambassadorial residences — the conjunction of stacks of old newspapers signalled a tradition now threatened by a new regime of technological communications. It all added up to a richly evocative and haunting mise en scène.

At that time Carey was not long out of art school. This was a seriously impressive display.

Born in Eastbourne, Carey grew up in the East Sussex town of Battle before studying Fine Art at Goldsmiths College, South East London. She graduated in 2007 from the Royal College of Art with an MA in sculpture and her work now appears in a number of prominent UK collections, including the Saatchi Collection, the David Roberts Collection and with the London and Swiss dealers Hauser and Wirth. (The chandelier installation was bought by an American private collector.)

Her new show at the Pump House Gallery in Battersea, entitled 'Somewhere, Nowhere', is another thoughtful and beautifully made body of work. The show opens with one of Carey's extraordinary hand-made vases of flowers (left), a fragile construction in plaster, wire, chiffon and lace that looks as if it might disintegrate under the faintest breath of air. I saw one of this series at a group show entitled 'Vanitas: The Transience of Earthly Pleasures' at 33 Portland Place last October when it more than held its own against the noisier works in the main rooms, despite being secreted away  beneath the stairs.

The Untitled vase piece in the Battersea show is juxtaposed against wall panels stencilled in cigarette ash with a repeating pattern imitating flock wallpaper. That theme of transience is a recurring motif in Carey's work and she continues to find new and emotionally affecting ways of exploring it.

Jodie Carey, Untitled (Blood Dust), 2011

Untitled (Blood Dust), (right) which occupies a room on the first floor, is a carpet of dried blood, the glittering, spangled surface of which shimmers in the sunlight pouring through the gallery window. Its carefully crafted bevelled edge gives the illusion of it being embedded into the floor or sewn like the hem of a rug. It is hypnotically beautiful.

Upstairs Carey has devoted two galleries to her series of plaster panels (at least I assume they are plaster). Their pristine white surfaces are smeared and fissured in places to reveal an internal layer of delicate filigree as if a fragment of net curtaining had been immured beneath a blanket of snow. You have to get up close and personal to these panels to appreciate their whispered intimacies.

Like her Eastbourne show, the current exhibition reveals Carey as a thoughtful and conscientious practitioner capable of embedding her ideas in beautifully crafted objects. The strength of the underlying ideas is always crucial, but it's the material result that counts in sculpture. On that measure, Carey qualifies as one of the most talented young artists working today.

Somewhere, Nowhere is at the Pump House Gallery, Battersea Park, London SW11 until 19 June. Admission free

John Atkin's astrolable unveiled in Beijing

This new large-scale work (left) by Darlington-based British sculptor John Atkin (FRBS) has just been unveiled at the Ordos City Sculpture Park in China.

The work — entitled The Road Not Taken — is modelled on a mariner's astrolabe. John was originally inspired by the marine instruments he'd encountered at the Shipwreck Museum in Bembridge on the Isle of Wight where he made several drawings. "I was fascinated with how objects reflect our history and geographical location," he says.

The work follows on from another monumental piece John completed for the Beijing Olympic Games in 2008. Strange Meeting, a two-piece marble and granite composition weighing 27 tonnes, was inspired by the eponymous poem by First World War poet Wilfred Owen. It was placed outside Beijing Olympic stadium and was the only British large-scale sculpture displayed in Beijing during the games.

John sees these pieces as tributes to his North East background. He sees the region as "having led the way over the past twenty years in terms of placing art within the public realm," (Antony Gormley's Angel of the North and Sean Henry's Couple at Newbiggin and Man with Potential Selves in Newcastle city centre are just a few of the more successful recent examples of what John's referring to).

Having beaten numerous international sculptors to win his Chinese Olympic commission, John is understandably hopeful that the forthcoming London Olympiad will offer further opportunities to artists like himself. However, given the tyrannical dominance of Turner Prize-orientated "sculpture," within the metrocentric village of the London art world, that could be wishful thinking. (To describe Turner Prize-winning artist Susan Phillipsz's sound installation as "sculpture" is to fundamentally misunderstand the meaning of the world sculpture.)

Meanwhile John's recent Chinese commissions have  again demonstrated that British sculpture is a broader church than the Tate mandarins would have you believe. It is respected the world over and  opportunities for ambitious working artists are now as likely to come from elsewhere in the global art economy as from more parochial UK commissions.

You can listen to John discussing his Beijing Olympic commission on a short BBC video here.

Benedetto Pietromarchi at Josh Lilley Gallery

From Another Place (detail)
Benedetto Pietromarchi
(Courtesy Josh Lilley Gallery)

In 2008, Benedetto Pietromarchi was awarded the Kenneth Armitage Foundation Fellowship, which allowed him to live and work for two years in the late British sculptor’s studio residence in Kensington. During that period, as well as making new work he has also spent a good deal of time travelling — not in the conventional geographical sense of moving from place to place, but in the imaginative mode associated with the mental wanderer, the armchair traveller.  The current exhibition at Josh Lilley Gallery in London has emerged in large part from that meditative process and particularly from Pietromarchi’s interest in the nebulous realm of psychogeography.

As Guy Debord, the founding guru of psychogeography himself acknowledged, the term has always had a “pleasing vagueness”, but to Pietromarchi its significance was clear enough. For him it marked the intersection of a number of his enduring interests, touching upon the idea of the voyage, the patterns of geological time, humanity’s ecological footprint, the illusory nature of representation. And there was something else that Pietromarchi noticed too. Despite its origins in aesthetics and the transformation of urban life, psychogeography has spawned no visual art to speak of, its main legacy lying instead within the literary and political spheres, and of course in the act of walking itself, where psychology and geography coincide.

The apparent absence of any psychogeography-inspired sculpture prompted Pietromarchi to combine into a whole a number of the ostensibly discrete works that have emerged from his recent research. It is these drawings, photographs, ceramic objects, and an intriguing diorama construction, that make up the current exhibition. While he has loosely conjoined them in such a way that they enrich and illuminate one another, they remain autonomous objects, each with its own subtle allusions. In this sense the work preserves something of the oneiric nature of psychogeography’s essential character, while illuminating its connection to a surrealist sensibility.

Pietromarchi’s classical training and respect for craft give him mastery over a broad range of studio disciplines. The decision to build a diorama might have prompted less versatile contemporary artists to outsource the work to a specialist workshop. However, the need for a kind of ‘wrap-around’ hexagonal enclosure of backlit screens combining drawing and photographs merely presented to Pietromarchi an opportunity to do what he enjoys most — to hunker down and construct it all himself. The result unwittingly updates a long-neglected aspect of London’s Enlightenment visual culture — the panoramas, dioramas and other optical devices that proliferated in the early nineteenth century.

Pietromarchi’s screen chamber is a bewitching creation in the tradition of Philip de Loutherbourg’s famous Eidophusikon, or Louis Daguerre’s dioramas that wowed the London public in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Such ‘devices of wonder’ offered momentary escape from the here and now, a flight into the immersive solitude of the self. Pietromarchi’s low-tech construction achieves a similar dream-like effect, drawing us into its strange oceanic ambience, slowing time, reconnecting the eye to the imagination.

Benedetto Pietromarchi,  
Module I,  
(Courtesy Josh Lilley Gallery)

The current body of work extends the arc of Pietromarchi’s creative trajectory to date. We now look back to the extraordinary ceiling-hung work entitled Module 1 (right)— an inflated rubber harbour-fender mounted with a steel-framed seat, completed shortly after commencing his Armitage Fellowship — and view it in a fresh light. A compelling sculptural object possessed of both airborne and maritime connotations, hovering somewhere between Géricault, Jules Verne and Heath Robinson, Module 1 offered a foretaste of the surrealist psychogeographical travels that lay ahead.

Journeying deep into his mind’s eye, beneath the radar of his conscious mind, Pietromarchi has discovered a rich seam of experimental material that will likely sustain him for some time to come.