Useful Bench developed from an attempt by Dunhill and O’Brien to collaborate on small clay sculptures. They constructed a long bench that allowed a clay form to travel between them via a pulley, each artist given twenty minutes to work before it was conveyed to the other end.
Faced with a form already partly modelled by the other, each repeatedly altered and defaced it until it felt recognisably their own again. Unsurprisingly, they were also unable to agree on when the sculpture was finished, each preferring their own most recent version.
Useful Bench became a souvenir of this process. At timed intervals, a plasticine lump travels almost imperceptibly slowly along the shelf, taking twenty minutes to reach the opposite end. As it moves, its shadow passes between the two artists, becoming almost as present as the lump itself, while a miniature billboard carries a projected image of them at work.
This work was one element in Dunhill and O’Brien’s project Holes & Other Undertakings supported by Nottingham Trent University.