Galleries

TERMS & CONDITIONS

 
Terms & Conditions was a new work made for the AirSpace gallery in Stoke-on-Trent as part of the British Ceramics Biennial 2019.
Following various research visits and workshops in Stoke, Dunhill and O’Brien recruited a team of volunteer participants from the area to work with them during a 3-week residency.

Each member of the group, including a dentist, dressmaker, boulderer, sports masseur, translator, jeweller, baker and engineer, agreed to step outside of their individual comfort zones to explore a range of ‘terms and conditions’ for collaborative making, using raw clay, and methods that tested the limits of verbal and visual communication. Working within a purpose built modular ‘Dexion’ structure, they each employed their unique 3D problem solving skills developed through their occupations and hobbies.

The exhibition that followed the residency consisted of a number of elements: a large custom-made structure forming the workshop/laboratory space; unfired raw clay objects made by the team of participants; video documentation of the processes involved; a wall text, and a 3.5 tonne raw clay form sculpted by Dunhill and O’Brien, and based upon information gathered during the workshops.

Sitting in and among these elements were a number of found rocks as well as images and videos of rocks. These were used as source material and prompts for the various activities, and connect this new work to Dunhill and O’Brien’s long-standing fascination with naturally formed rocks and stones, both as they are represented in popular culture, and as material, physical objects.

Proposition 1 (Window)
Collection of clay objects made collaboratively by participants, kept damp through a sprinkler system, and added to following workshop sessions held during the exhibition.

Proposition 2 (Sitting)
Making spaces for up to 4 seated participants. The central unit designed for two people to model the same clay object together (filmed from above); the two units on either side are for individual making (filmed from the side). Small LED screens show images used as source material. The proposition is to understand and translate the 2-dimensional images into 3 dimensional forms, solely employing tactile interpretation.

Proposition 3 (Standing)
Making space for two participants standing side by side, with a shared tabletop unit (filmed from the front). There are two options with this proposition. In the first, a participant describes how to make a rock they are exploring through touch for up to 20 minutes, while the other uses tactile interpretation to model it in clay. In the second version a participant, at an adjoining workspace, observes and gives instructions to two participants at the standing unit, who model versions of the same object in tandem for approximately 20 minutes.

Proposition 4 (Table)
Making space for up to 5 participants employed for an introductory exercise. This session is not filmed though the outcomes are kept and displayed. In the centre of a large table area a small rock (flint) rotates very slowly on a turntable. Each participant models a clay form based on the flint for 5 minutes before swapping places to work on their neighbour’s clay model for 5 minutes. This exchange continues until each member of the group has been involved in modelling every one of the clay objects. Adjoining the table is a sink as well as a storage area for the aprons and tools used by the participants.

Proposition 5 (Shelf)
Collection of collaborative clay objects made from Proposition 4 (Table). This collection will be added to during the exhibition following further workshop sessions. Stored on the shelf are also various rocks that have been employed in Proposition 3 (Standing).

Proposition 6 (Video monitor)
A video documenting Proposition 3 (Standing), duration 3.5 hours.

Proposition 7 (How to Make a Rock – Object)
3 tonne clay sculpture made over an 8-hour period by Dunhill and O’Brien, employing sound recordings from Proposition 3 (Standing) where different participants describe how to make a rock in clay.

Proposition 8 (How to Make a Rock – Text)
A number of texts transcribing the recorded descriptions made by a number of participants during Proposition 3 (Standing).

Proposition 9 (How to Make a Rock – Video)
A video documenting the process involved in Proposition 7 (How to Make a Rock – Object).  Duration 1hour

With very special thanks to our participants: Ayad Al-Ani, Melissa Beardmore, Silvia Cotelea–Cazacu, Joanna Dawidowska, Sarah Delvari Zadeh, Steve James, Taraneh Noroozi Farsangi, Shelia Podmore, Anna Robinson, Leo Robinson, Len Robinson, John Shapter, Emma Tunnell, Asal Vahedi, and to Sophie Ashcroft, Sandy Auden, Lynn Davis, Genesis Rowley and Claire Stewart for input during preliminary workshop tests. We would also like to thank Gavin Birkin and Pete Smith for pitching in to help shift a tonnage of clay and to John Plowman and Glen Stoker for their practical and professional help and their generous encouragement and insight throughout the development and realisation of the project.

This project was supported by the Arts Council England and Valentine Clays Limited, with professional support from Beacon Projects and AirSpace Gallery.

Digging a hole in the ground is a practical task. For millennia humans have dug holes for many reasons: to drain water from land; to lay foundations; to plant food supplies; deal with waste; make storage space, and to create space for tombs and graves.
 

In June 2002 during a residency at the European Ceramic Work Centre (EKWC), Dunhill and O’Brien posted a small ad in the Brabants Dagblad newspaper offering to dig holes for free. Five residents from the s’Hertogenbosch area invited them to their gardens, farms and allotments seeking holes for various purposes.
 

Each time Dunhill and O’Brien dug a hole they cast it in plaster. This resulted in a collection of inverted plaster objects documenting the impressions of their labour. Moulds were made of the resulting abstract sculptural forms and these were cast to become a group of large-scale ceramic sculptures made using locally sourced clay.
 

This artwork, HOLES II, was later transported to the UK where it was exhibited a few times before going into storage. In 2022 they were invited to temporarily site the work at the Grange in Norfolk, while they formed an intention to finally return the large multi part sculpture to the earth.
 

Fortunately, the owners of the Grange enjoyed the idea of taking ownership of a sculpture that remained out of sight, and contracts were drawn up to set out both the terms of ownership (i.e. that the artwork should remain buried for at least fifteen years) and the rights of the artists to a burial plot for the same duration.
A commemorative plaque and wildflower planting can be visited at the site of the burial at the Grange. The ‘what 3 words’ location is: //bucket.tomb.shook
 

The commemorative booklet produced following the burial in July 2024 is available as a digital flipbook below.
 

 
NB. there were in fact two artworks resulting from the hole digging project in s’Hertogenbosch the other work, HOLES I, is documented here.
 

Dunhill and O’Brien made the short video Bad Idea for the Bad Ideas Collective project curated by Kristaps Ancans and Alex Shady during the Lockdown of 2020.

The full series of Bad Ideas Collective short films can be viewed here alternatively you can watch Bad Idea below.

Anthology hovered somewhere between a storage shed, a reconstruction of an artist’s studio and a mini retrospective. It was made in response to a historic malthouse building and a small museum room adjacent to the gallery where scenes from the building’s former function were reconstructed.  

 
The works featured in Anthology related to Dunhill and O’Brien’s preoccupation with naturally formed rocks, stones and boulders.
In Western culture stones and rocks often have negative associations. But there are many other cultures where rocks are venerated and used as a focus for contemplation or pilgrimage. Dunhill and O’Brien have a longstanding interest in the Japanese tradition of Suiseki translated as the Art of Stone Appreciation, here something apparently lowly and ubiquitous is treasured and given great status.
Dunhill and O’Brien have long pondered over how they can best appreciate stones.
 

Image 1: View of shed like structure including a viewing hole
Image 2: View inside the hole of Grasp the Sparrow’s Tail
Image 3: View showing the corridor walkway created by the installation
below the main carousel
Image 4: View from the gallery entrance into the ‘back’ of the installation showing: Stone Appreciation 2; Examples in Sculpture; Balanced Rock: Stack; Grasp the Sparrow’s Tail and Erratic (still)

 
 
EIS: work out (10 mins 41 seconds) was made for Danielle Arnaud Gallery’s online exhibition, 25 years. Made during the Lockdown in summer 2020 it relates to the work Examples in Sculpture made during a residency in Rome some twenty years earlier.
 
 

First invented in 1936 polyethylene is an oil-based material. Tarpaulins made of woven polyethylene went into production in the 1970s and are now used on a global scale, with blue tarpaulin as the most lightweight and ubiquitous.
 

This vivid blue material that so frequently punctuates human habitations has become almost invisible. While providing covering and protecting objects, it hides them in plain sight while creating new and intriguing forms. It is the go-to material for keeping farming equipment dry; providing improvised shelter for post-disaster situations; covering stacks of logs, boats, and freshly made tombs; smothering weeds on allotments; keeping the possessions of homeless people dry; protecting sculpture packing cases in leaking storage units and weather-proofing random items transported on pick-up trucks.
 

As an architectural object the m2 pavilion hovers between the private and public space of what could otherwise be a driveway. This unique and somewhat eccentric art space temporarily took a rest from presenting artworks in its vitrine windows for the duration of Dunhill and O’Brien’s exhibition. Instead, a tailor-made blue tarpaulin jacket covered all of its external and internal surfaces. Meanwhile, a film of their blue tarpaulin photographic collection was shown in the m2 window gallery.
 

The afterlife of this project will see the tarpaulin jacket packed and taken as luggage during a residency in Tokyo where it will be converted by thermochemical decomposition back to oil.
 

Images 1 – 3: Street views of HIDE at m2 pavilion (photo credits Andrew Watson)
Images 4-5: Window gallery with monitor screening HIDE
Images 6 – 12: Stills from HIDE video

In 2021 peripatetic curator Sandie Macrae established her home off the Essex Road in London as PostROOM, making exhibitions in a functioning domestic space including her kitchen, dining area and garden shed. For their solo show Modern Object at PostROOM in November 2022, Dunhill and O’Brien made new works employing upholstered components to respond to the modernist style of the space and furniture while inserting a number of earlier works and objects from their collection.
 
Click here for a list of titles and other information.

From 750 words a week, a blog by art writer Paul O’Kane
 
“Most of their work reveals a head-on negotiation, not only with each other but with the underlying concepts and context of their duality, their ‘two-ness’ and their collaboration. This includes examination of the way that idea-production, conceptual refinement, design and manufacture all take place in an especially candid and visible arena once artists choose, or are forced to work outside the more private confines of a more typical practice.
Suffice to say that the works of these collaborating artists always provoke intrigue, fascination and amusement while often delivering a special and memorable sense of bathos. Dunhill & O’Brien also demonstrate that much humour tends to derive from such collaboration.”
 
photography by Andrew Watson

Contrapposto (4 mins) was made for the Isolation Room project during the Covid Pandemic in summer 2020. This ‘studio visit’ film responds to a series of questions about working during the Lockdown.
 
 
 
 

In January 2023 curator Corina L Apostol invited Dunhill and O’Brien to make new work for a ‘two-person’ show alongside Latvian based artist Kristaps Ancans at Das Weisse Haus in Vienna. Apostol proposed the title ‘Reverse Homesickness’ a literal trannslation of ‘Das Fernweh’ a German word that describes a physical and emotional ache resulting from the desire to be eleswhere. Dunhill and O’Brien formulated quite an elaborate narrative to work with, related to a misinterpretation of a press release from an installation they made during a residency in Tokyo in 2007… The resulting artworks shown from May to July 2023 were tailor made and upholstered in a solid blue canvas to be carried or worn by the duo (when not installed in an exhibition). Intended to function as implements and accessories as well as Sculptures, they form a growing series of artworks entitled the Double Happiness Collection.
 
The ongoing series of videoworks titled Stone Appreciation were also shown during the exhibition.
 

Special thanks are due to Dr Corina L Apostol, Kristaps Ancāns, and the great team at Das Weisse Haus (particularly Pia Wamsler and Ralitsa Petkova who are both brilliant to work with).

The Shoulder Sculptures are based on raw clay forms (since destroyed) from Dunhill and O’Brien’s previous artworks. Initially made for the White Conduit stand at London Art Fair in 2019, the Shoulder Sculptures were either worn by the gallery director or stored in pairs on a shelf, with their harnesses hanging below.

 
Lost Work: Terms & Conditions
This shoulder sculpture is based on Dunhill & O’Brien’s 2019 installation for the British Ceramics Biennial, Terms & Conditions, which included a 3.5 ton raw clay form made in a single day and based on recordings of descriptions of rocks made during a series of workshops by a dentist, dressmaker, boulderer, baker, engineer and masseur. During the exhibition the raw clay form was kept damp so that it could later be distributed to local people for free. People came by car, bicycle, bus, and on foot, to collect bags of clay to use in their own creative work.
 
Lost Work: Sculptomatic 2
For the exhibition Sculptomatic 2 at Kunstvereniging Diepenheim, Holland, Dunhill and O’Brien worked with Dutch and UK participants, employing locally sourced clay to make a 2.5 ton raw clay form. After the exhibition the clay was returned to the suppliers for use in brick making.
 
Lost Work: Mountain Object
Mountain Object was made at the end of Dunhill and O’Brien’s first residency at Youkobo Art Space in Tokyo. Geta (Japanese clogs), with platform souls based on 2 mountain ranges in the Nikko area were used to model a clay mound on a turntable. The clay was later donated to the materials store for the residency.
 
Lost Work: Sculptomatic 1
Sculptomatic 1 was a large-scale installation that included a 10 metre motorised elevator as well as 500 images of sculptures from different periods and cultures that included holes. Assistants were employed to make clay models based on the images and each soft clay form was placed on the motorised structure, dropping from height into a vitrine to create a collective sculptural form, a 2 ton mass of raw clay. After the exhibition the clay was given to local art students.