Anthology hovered somewhere between a storage shed, a reconstruction of an artist’s studio, a plant nursery and a mini retrospective. Made in response to a historic malthouse, the installation also took its cue from a small museum room beside the gallery in which scenes from the building’s former working life had been carefully reconstructed.
Years after their first collaborative exhibition, PLOT (in which groups of artworks from their former solo practices were concealed beneath tailor-made covers) Dunhill and O’Brien returned to using past works as the stuff, or material, from which to make something new together.
Like the contents of a poetry anthology, selected works were lifted from their original contexts and placed into unfamiliar company. Some were largely obscured; others appeared as fragments, props, images or evidence of activity. A billboard-sized landscape photograph showed a boulder stitched into a close-fitting blue tarpaulin jacket; plaster forms reminiscent of a quarry and earth mound appeared on ornate stands; while videos of two people industriously measuring a rock or modelling a clay form were left somewhat adrift on sturdy packing cases. Nearby, a pile of plates on an uncomfortably narrow trolley appeared rather more arbitrary, although the image of a balanced rock on the uppermost souvenir plate offered a possible clue.
The main entrance to the gallery took viewers along a narrow passage created by Dunhill and O’Brien’s temporary structure, allowing only restricted glimpses into the installation. From the main gallery, what appeared to be its ‘back’ contained a small window through which a more intimate motorised work could be glimpsed: an embroidered handkerchief gently stroking the top of a plaster rock.
Sited on the former malting floor, a place once devoted to germination, Anthology became less a retrospective than a kind of rumination, with earlier works made to rub up against one another and, in doing so, temporarily brought back into circulation.
Image 1: View of installation including 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
Images 4 and 5: 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)
With thanks to Bonvin & Eden for their curation of the exhibition and project support.