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Grasp the Sparrow’s Tail takes its title from a tai chi sequence involving a series of subtle shifts in weight. At one point, one hand lightly brushes over the other before both hands draw back to push an invisible assailant. Like trying to pat one’s head while rubbing one’s stomach, the sequence depends on coordinating different movements.
 
The work itself resembles a piece of apparatus. Through a small porthole-like opening, a plaster cast of a rock turns slowly while a handkerchief embroidered with tiny flowers moves across its surface, gently caressing — or perhaps dusting — it. The two movements do not quite settle into perfect synchronisation, giving the action a halting, precarious quality that is slow, repetitive and oddly tender.

 
A number of plausible narratives coexist within the work, depending on whether you speak to Dunhill or O’Brien — and perhaps on their mood or the time of day. It may relate to their repeated attempts to master grasping the sparrow’s tail; to casting rocks more than twenty years ago; to finding unused handkerchiefs in a carved wooden box; to a remembered sequence from the Taviani brothers’ film Kaos; to the absurdity of Brexit; or to the Japanese art of stone appreciation.
 
It is a modest work asked to make room for rather a lot. In the end, Dunhill and O’Brien’s persistent problem — how to make sculpture together — has produced something in which making is reduced to the lightest of interactions.

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).

Object, Walk, Phone developed from three days Dunhill and O’Brien spent examining an eleventh-century bell-casting pit at a former Cistercian abbey in Tuscania, Italy. The pit had originally been made by itinerant bell founders to cast the abbey bell and was later reused as a burial place for monks.
 
What interested them was the way the original hole connected a very physical act of making with something much less tangible: the sound of the bell travelling out across the surrounding landscape, marking time and extending the authority of the abbey beyond its walls.
 
The resulting work, shown in Just World Order at Artsway Gallery in 2008, took three forms. Object was a tailor-made lining formed directly inside the bell pit. Walk was a guidebook for a route based on the estimated distance the sound of the original bell might have travelled, transposed onto the landscape around the gallery. Phone was a mobile phone programmed with the sound of a medieval bell of comparable size and weight, recorded at the Whitechapel Bell Foundry, which rang intermittently throughout the exhibition.
 
Together, the three elements shifted between material, distance and sound: from the physical shape of the hole, to the territory a bell might reach, to the sudden intrusion of its sound into the gallery.