Galleries

In 1981 Isamu Noguchi completed Thunder Rock, a 15-tonne granite sculpture that subsequently crossed the Pacific three times in search of a home after its original commissioner in the USA was unable to complete the purchase.
 
When Dunhill and O’Brien encountered the sculpture in Yorkshire on a cold, windy day in March 2009, they were struck by the tension between Noguchi’s ambition to make an elemental form that might transcend the banalities of everyday life and the decidedly more prosaic business of repeatedly crating, shipping, storing and insuring fifteen tonnes of granite. The expanding carbon footprint and accompanying paper trail seemed a particularly poignant example of sculpture’s troublesome relationship with the practical world.
 
Invited some years later to make a temporary work for a park in Tokyo, Dunhill and O’Brien returned to Thunder Rock. Using photographs and written descriptions, they constructed a full-size transcription of the sculpture, tailoring distressed beige and cream leatherette to mimic its carved and uncarved granite surfaces. Unlike the original, their Rock could be collapsed and stowed as cabin luggage.
 
Something between an oversized Pakamac and an improbable sports holdall, Rock travelled Economy Class with them to Tokyo, followed by a visit to Noguchi’s studio and the granite quarry in Shikoku from which they believe Thunder Rock itself had been cut.
 
Back in Tokyo, reassembled and fully upholstered, the ungainly object was cautiously wheeled through the back streets of Nishi-Ogikubo, taking a convoluted route to avoid the steep hill between the studio and Zempukuji Park. There it finally came to rest for a month in a picturesque position overlooking the lake.
 

This project was made possible thanks to support from the Arts and Humanities Research Council and a research award from the University of the Arts London.

Dunhill and O’Brien’s first residency in Japan took place at Youkobo Art Space in Tokyo during a sweltering summer. They arrived wanting to climb Japan’s sacred mountains, but also with the nagging sense that a residency ought to involve maximum time devoted to working in the studio.
 
At the same time they became fascinated by the extraordinary range of tools, gadgets and specialist accessories available in Japanese hardware shops, and by the elaborate etiquette surrounding footwear: shoes continually removed and replaced by different kinds of indoor slipper depending on where one was permitted to walk. This combination of mountain longing, practical ingenuity and the urge to be productive presented a useful quandary. If they could not spend all their time climbing mountains, perhaps they could devise tools with which to experience Japan’s mountainous topography in the studio instead.
 
They made a pair of highly impractical geta whose soles were based on the contours of two different Japanese mountain ranges. Because the gallery’s wooden floor could not be walked on in outdoor footwear, the clogs required a territory of their own: a specially built platform on which the clay modelling could take place.
 
Dressed in white paper overalls and tabi socks, and using bamboo staffs simply to remain upright, Dunhill and O’Brien had twenty minutes to transform a carefully prepared, smooth mound of clay using only the soles of the geta. The procedure was tightly controlled, yet the treatment of the clay was deliberately perverse — kicking, pressing and grinding a material more usually handled with care. Each artist was effectively modelling with a different mountain underfoot, while simultaneously interfering with what the other was trying to make.
 
The resulting Mountain Object was therefore less a representation of a landscape than a small-scale contest between two of them. The installation brought together the clay form, the geta, staffs and other apparatus used in its making, alongside a video of this precarious and increasingly competitive encounter.
 

This project was made possible thanks to the support of Arts Council England and a research grant from the University of the Arts London.

Rockery filled the upstairs gallery at White Conduit Projects, a former shop with a large street-facing window, with an emphatic accumulation of ‘rocks’. They were arranged across shelves, tables and makeshift display structures in a way that echoed the busy fruit and vegetable stalls of the street market nearby: part shop display, part compulsive collection.
 
The work grew out of Dunhill and O’Brien’s fascination with fujizuka — miniature Mount Fujis built in and around Edo-period Tokyo by devotional groups to support those unable to make the pilgrimage to the mountain itself. Lava rocks were carried back from Fuji and used to construct these surrogate mountains, each one a unique interpretation of the sacred original.
 
Dunhill and O’Brien’s response was considerably less reverent. Like tourists everywhere, they photographed what they encountered, accumulating images as a way of taking something home. Souvenirs, photographs and other trophies of travel all perform a similar trick: allowing us to possess, however inadequately, something that properly belongs elsewhere.
 
For Rockery, these heavily charged forms were translated into cardboard cut-outs — almost the antithesis of sculpture — propped, stacked and displayed on furniture. Much of the installation had been devised as lightweight, flat-pack elements that could travel from Tokyo and be reconfigured in London. The ominous little mountain range that confronted visitors and passers-by could be seen as a slightly overenthusiastic account of ‘where they had been on their holidays’, rendered in forms that remained curiously brooding.

Notes:

 

Fujizuka – In the Edo period (1603 to 1868) over a thousand Fujizuka ranging from 5 – 30 metres high were constructed in and around Tokyo from tonnes of lava rocks collected and transported from the sacred mountain. At that time when women and the infirm were not permitted or able to climb the volcano, these ‘land art’ constructions were built for the local community, to simulate the experience of climbing the final and most sacred stage of Mt Fuji, often serving as a platform to view Mt Fuji. Some of these Fujizuka remain more or less intact hidden in between high-rise apartments in the centre of the city or in unlikely suburban areas.

 

Fujizuka visited for this work: Asakusa Fuji; Ekoda Fuji; Fukagawa Hachiman Fuji; Hakusan Fuji; Higashi Okubo Fuji; Igusa Fuji; Ikebukuro Fuji; Itebashi Hikawa Fuji; Jujo Fuji; Kanda Yanagimori Fuji; Kanda Fuji; Kami Ochiai Fuji ; Komagome Fuji; Meguro Fuji; Meguro Moto Fuji Ato; Meguro Shin Fuji Ato; Minami Senji Fuji; Naruko Fuji; Nishi Okubo Fuji; Otowa Fuji; Oiki Fuji; Oizumi Fuji; Okawa Fuji; Sunamachi Fuji; Sendagaya Fuji; Senju Miyamoto Fuji; Senju Yanagihara Fuji; Shimokamata Fuji; Shinagawa Fuji; Shirahige Fuji ; Shinjuku Fuji; Shitaya Sakimoto Fuji; Tabata fuji; Takada Fuji; Teppozu Fuji; Tomizuka Fuji.

 

Acknowledgements:

 

This exhibition was made possible due to the generous support of Youkobo Art Space and The Japanese Agency for Cultural Affairs.
With special thanks to: Yuki Miyake (co-director of White Conduit Projects), Tatsuhiko and Hiroko Murata (joint Directors of Youkobo Art Space); Yoko Arisaka (Artist and Fujizuka expert); Satoshi Ikeda and Jaime Humphreys (expert translation for research).

Stone Appreciation 2 took as its subject six free-standing and, to varying degrees, well-known rocks: the Bowder Stone, the Idol Rock, the Toad Rock, the Chiding Stone, the Hitching Stone and the Big Stone at Bentham.
 
Dunhill and O’Brien first encountered these ‘celebrity’ rocks through old postcards found online. Some dated back to the turn of the twentieth century and had travelled from the rocks themselves to people across the world, been kept for years, and then eventually posted on again to Dunhill and O’Brien. Each small object carried a strangely intimate history of looking, visiting and remembering. The randomness of the collection began to dictate a journey: if a postcard arrived, perhaps the rock ought to be found.
 
Visiting the rocks led to the more questionable business of measuring them. There was something faintly presumptuous about arriving with tapes and poles and attempting to take possession of these already much-photographed landmarks through dimensions. Asked repeatedly by passers-by what they were doing, Dunhill and O’Brien discovered that the most satisfactory answer was: ‘We’re going to make a portrait of the rock, so we need to measure it.’ This seemed to please people, and gave them sufficient licence to continue.
 
The videos record the cumbersome choreography of these encounters: clambering over, under and around the rocks in an effort to establish even rudimentary proportions.
 
Back in the studio, Dunhill and O’Brien attempted their portraits in plasticine, working simultaneously on specially adapted modelling stands. Working together at the stands was awkward and reminiscent of an art-school modelling exercise. Shown alongside the videos rather than given precedence over them, the plasticine forms functioned less as resolved sculptures than as further examples of the process: another attempt to get to know, record and somehow possess an obstinately uncooperative rock.
 

This project at the Drill Hall in Portland was supported by funding from the Cultural Olympiad, Maritime Mix.

Moving Image follows a life-size photographic image of the wrapped Norber erratic as it is wheeled through Ritsurin Garden in Takamatsu, Japan. Mounted on a large stretcher-like frame, the image is manoeuvred along paths, across bridges and through carefully composed views in the historic daimyo strolling garden.
 
Dunhill and O’Brien wear the pale green overalls used by the professional garden team, lending the journey a purposeful air. Visitors, gardeners and passers-by encounter a serious task in progress, although its purpose may remain perplexing.
 
The contrast between the windblown Yorkshire boulder and the garden’s highly cultivated landscape is heightened by the heat and humidity of typhoon season. What began as an image of a displaced rock becomes itself a travelling object, moving through another landscape by human effort.
 
The video was shown in the Folk Craft Museum within the garden, discreetly embedded among an existing display of cabinets and utensils rather. Happened upon in this way, Moving Image altered the atmosphere of the room, making the surrounding objects seem more expectant, perhaps awaiting their relocation.
 
Moving Image was shown as part of a project for the Setouchi Triennale alongside the work Erratic.

A postcard of John Atkinson Grimshaw’s 1868 painting first drew Dunhill and O’Brien to the Bowder Stone, not least because of the staircase attached to it — turning an already improbable boulder into something part viewing platform, part architecture.

 
For a solo exhibition at Gallery Fleur in Kyoto, they made a full-scale fabric transcription of the upper section of the rock. Seventy metres of cotton calico were fitted directly over its surface, rather like a dressmaker’s toile, before being removed, transported to Japan and reconstructed in the gallery on a framework of wooden props and sandbags.

 
What interested Dunhill and O’Brien was the strange displacement involved: a kind of soft cast taken from a massive outdoor landmark and carried into a subterranean gallery on the other side of the world.

 
Alongside this, the Stone Appreciation Study Room brought together images and objects relating to the cultural lives of particular rocks and stones, developed with Fine Art students at Kyoto Seika University.

This project was supported by Kyoto Seika University and the University of the Ats London.

Sculptomatic 2 was made for Kunstvereniging Diepenheim in Holland and shown in the same month as Sculptomatic 1. Because the two works were being exhibited simultaneously, simply rebuilding the machinery of Sculptomatic 1 was neither possible nor particularly appealing. Instead, the second work was made entirely on site, using the gallery’s unusual vertical architecture as part of its construction.
 
As before, local participants were given images drawn from a collection of 500 sculptures containing holes and asked to model them in clay. Here the material was a heavy, locally sourced brick clay, whose colour and dense physical quality gave the forms a different character. The Dutch participants also approached the task rather differently: interpretations were often looser, less formal and occasionally wandered off script altogether.
 
A Dexion ‘dumb waiter’ carried the freshly made objects to an upper level of the gallery, where they were transferred onto a motorised conveyor belt projecting over the main space like a diving board. From there, one by one, they travelled to a point five metres above the floor before dropping into a large vitrine below.
 
The exhibition included the machinery and materials involved in the process, alongside photographs of the individual clay forms before their fall and a two-hour video showing the sculpture slowly accumulating in the vitrine. At the end of the exhibition, the clay was returned to the local brick factory, allowing the material to re-enter the cycle from which it had come.

This project was made possible through funding by the Arts Council England, Kunstvereniging Diepenheim and the University of the West of England.

Sculptomatic 1 began with a collection of 500 images of sculptures from different periods and cultures, all selected for one apparently arbitrary reason: they contained some kind of hole.
 
The images were stripped of information about scale, location and context, then handed to a crew of twenty participants who were asked to make clay versions at a rate of five an hour. The intention was to set up a system in which Dunhill and O’Brien could generate a new sculpture while interfering with it as little as possible.
 
Each freshly modelled form was photographed, placed on a wooden tray and sent slowly up a ten-metre motorised elevator. At a height of around five metres it dropped into a vitrine below. One new object fell every thirty seconds, gradually collapsing, deforming and fusing with those already there until the individual models became a single two-tonne mass of raw clay.
 
The final installation included the machinery, modelling stations and other materials involved in the process, alongside a four-hour video showing the sculpture slowly accumulating in the vitrine.

This project was made possible through funding by the Arts Council England, The James Hockey Gallery and the University of the West of England.

Drawing, in its widest sense, has always been part of Dunhill and O’Brien’s collaborative process — a way of testing, measuring, arguing, planning and trying things out.
 
Rock Drawing brings together sketches, diagrams, photographs, models and other working material generated during the making of Rock. Rather than illustrating the finished sculpture, these fragments record the negotiations, practical problems and changes of direction that accumulated around it.
 
The work also extended the idea of drawing into movement. When the upholstered Rock was wheeled through the back streets of Nishi-Ogikubo to Zempukuji Park, taking a convoluted route to avoid a steep hill, the journey itself became a kind of physical drawing through the city.

New Japanese Object grew out of Dunhill and O’Brien’s search for surviving fujizuka across Tokyo. These miniature Mount Fujis were built during the Edo period by Fuji-ko devotional groups, often using lava brought back from the sacred mountain itself. Each was a particular, human-scale interpretation of Fuji, made to allow those unable to undertake the pilgrimage to experience something of its final ascent.
 
Using maps, local knowledge and chance encounters, O’Brien visited and photographed thirty-six surviving fujizuka. Often half-hidden among apartment blocks, offices and suburban streets, they became a way of encountering Mount Fuji without leaving the city.
 
These photographs later became the raw material for New Japanese Object. Life-size images of individual lava rocks were printed, mounted on cardboard and arranged across a structure assembled from furniture and salvaged timber found in the artists’ studio and apartment. Tables, shelving units, suitcases and laundry baskets were pressed into service, followed eventually by smaller and increasingly improvised pieces of wood.
 
A video records Dunhill and O’Brien constructing the work. Echoing the careful handling practices of Tokyo removal workers they had observed, they move through a sequence of actions that became increasingly choreographed through repetition. At times they work together to manoeuvre something large or awkward; more often they seem to know independently what needs to happen next, like two stallholders setting out familiar wares without discussion.
 
The resulting accumulation of ‘rocks’ gradually filled the remaining space. The work emerged through a combination of rehearsal, practical ingenuity and tacit collaboration, with increasingly unlikely domestic objects recruited to support the illusion.
 
Parts of New Japanese Object later travelled to London, where its flat-pack rocks and improvised display structures were reconfigured as Rockery at White Conduit Projects.

This project was made possible due to the generous support of Youkobo Art Space and The Japanese Agency for Cultural Affairs.
With special thanks to: Tatsuhiko and Hiroko Murata (joint Directors of Youkobo Art Space); Yoko Arisaka (Artist and Fujizuka expert); Satoshi Ikeda and Jaime Humphreys (expert translation for research).

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