Galleries

USEFUL BENCH

In order to collaborate on small clay sculptures Dunhill and O’Brien constructed a long bench so that they could take turns in modelling and sculpting the same clay form. Each artist was designated twenty minutes in which to work before the clay form was conveyed by a pulley device to the other end of the bench.

Faced in turn with the already partly modelled form they found themselves compelled to completely alter and deface the other’s work until it was once again recognisably their own. Inevitably they could not agree upon when to finish making the work, each preferring their own latest efforts.

The Useful Bench is a souvenir of this working process. At timed intervals a plasticene lump slowly travels via a motor along a shelf in front of a miniature billboard with a projected image of the artists at work.

GATES

During their 3-month residency at the BSR in the summer of 2003 Dunhill and O’Brien found that the slow and stately movement of the electric gates at the back of the studios was in stark contrast to the pace of almost everything else in Rome.

Rome has various foreign academies and institutes; these cultural outposts were each established to enable their scholars to study the history, art and archaeology of Rome while also promoting their own culture. Dunhill and O’Brien couldn’t help noticing that these other institutions also had some fine examples of slow-moving electric gates.

With varying degrees of success they obtained permission to film some of the gates (the American, French and Egyptian Academies considered it too great a security risk). The gates were filmed opening and closing (without any traffic passing through them) once from the outside looking in and once from the inside looking out and, as theatre curtains determine whether we are the audience or the performers, so the viewers position in relation to the gates is made to repeatedly shift between outsider and insider.

While there was a certain degree of collector’s enthusiasm to this enterprise, something about the status of culture in the different countries was also revealed.

In Convey a number of soft forms based on the artists’ lost works, travel slowly in procession around a conveyor belt driven by an electric motor.

As each loosely stuffed object travels along the underside of the belt its structure and form is temporarily revealed, only to be lost again as it collapses once more when returned to the top of the belt.

As with other motorised works by Dunhill and O’Brien the movement is ‘geared down’ to be peculiarly slow. In this case it has a certain stately elegance and purposefulness while also being relentless, hopeless and awkward.

TRACK

Track was originally made as a temporary site-based installation for the Saxon Tithe Barn in Bradford-on-Avon in 2000. The work comprised a white form that glided slowly along a 15-metre horizontal track powered by an electric motor. The form took 20 minutes to travel the full length of the track where it would momentarily pause before slowly reversing and repeating its journey.

The important thing about Track that a photograph cannot show, is the slowness of the white form’s progress back and forth along the rails. The slowness is slower than the special halting march made before the cenotaph on Poppy Day. It is slower than Kung Fu walking on a rice paper scroll. It is slower than the shuffling gait of the oldest and most infirm pet dog. It is slower than the plaster original of GF Watt’s ‘Physical Energy’ as it is winched out of the shed at the back of the Watt’s Museum in Compton once a year. It is so slow that it is almost unbearable to watch.

The photograph does give some indication of the physicality of the form on the rails. You may notice that it is somewhat like a model of a mountain or a land mass. In 17th Century Japan, stones were collected for their likeness to mountains. Favourite ‘suiseki’ stones would accompany collectors on trips in specially made travelling cases. These stones were treasured and sometimes had their own attendant and separate transportation. The mountain-like form in ‘Track’ was not a special found object like the suiseki; it was instead the product of a day’s hole-digging.

Unlike the unclaimed luggage currently circumnavigating rubber conveyors at airports around the world, there is no hope that this object will ever arrive.  from Ev+a 2002 catalogue

This project was funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Board and Southern Arts (Arts Council of England)

POSTERS

LEFTOVER

Dunhill and O’Brien attempted to put their studio waste to good use. This work comprised all the test pieces, mock ups and unused components from a 2-year period collected together and covered with thick layers of grey ‘tarmac scatter granules’ (as used for model railway scenery).

The 567 dusted objects, which varied in size from a few centimetres to 2 metres were assembled together on a tailor-made cart/display case. This collection of redundant and failed objects acted as a kind of thesaurus of sculptural dysfunction.

THE LOST WORKS

(multiples)

The Lost Works of Dunhill and O’Brien is a series of resin multiples in which the artists’ lost works have been remade in miniature and placed in imagined ‘idyllic’ settings. While they may at first glance resemble gift shop mementoes or souvenirs, they are probably more related in function to grave goods.

First shown in Hanover, Germany (alongside a food related ‘range’ that were sold in an Art Vending Machine), a group of these multiples were later displayed under clear acrylic boxes on a trailer as part of the installation ‘Souvenir’ at the Tithe Barn in Bradford-on-Avon, UK. (see Track)

THE LOST WORKS

From the exhibition PLOT at the Cable Street Gallery, 1998.

In their first ‘solo’ show Dunhill and O’Brien exhibited 2 new installations. The Lost Works consisted of 100 plasticene sculptures based on lost artworks and components from installations that they had each made prior to 1998 as individual artists. These small-scale sculptures based on ‘missing’ artworks made over a twenty-five-year period were presented on shelves, grouped together according to their shape and structure.

There wasn’t any indication of the context, scale, material or motivation behind the lost work, and no sign of which artist authored either the new lost work in plasticene or the original work on which it was based. The only background information offered to the viewer was a date written in pencil on the wall above each object, indicating the year in which the original was completed.

STORED

From the exhibition, PLOT at the Cable Street Gallery, London, 1998.

This first installation by Dunhill and O’Brien comprised a selection of stored and packaged artworks (from their previous solitary art practices) grouped together and covered with tailor made vinyl jackets.

The covers were labelled at either end with words selected from the titles of the concealed artworks and appeared to be instructions on how to view the work.