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Method & Apparatus to Appreciate Iroha (MATA IROHA) began with an apparently simple question: how might the act of looking at a sculpture be prolonged? At a time when images are encountered and discarded with increasing speed, Dunhill and O’Brien set out to devise a method for paying sustained attention to a single work.
 
Browsing the collection of Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum online, they found themselves drawn to Mogami Hisayuki’s 1979 sculpture I, RO, HA…N. It seemed the least performative, less photogenic, less immediately ‘Instagrammable’, and for that reason oddly compelling.
 
Meeting the sculpture in person confirmed it. They were, in fact, rather smitten. Seen in the flesh, I, RO, HA…N proved to be a basalt boulder quite literally inscribed with language. Its carved characters come from the ancient Japanese Iroha poem, a text containing each of the 47 kana syllables of the Japanese language.
 
What followed became an elaborate and perhaps unreasonable attempt to learn how to appreciate something that had first attracted them precisely because it did not immediately yield itself. This involved more than one hundred other people and a chain of translations from object to language, to clay, to digital information and back again into an unruly sculpture.

 

METHOD
The research visit also confronted Dunhill and O’Brien with the scale of the museum’s monumental sculpture gallery. Their solution was to reconstruct the dimensions of their London studio as a life-size platform and wall structure in the gallery, allowing the installation to be mocked up and tested at home before being rebuilt in Tokyo. Part familiar workspace, part raft-like plinth, it became the stage on which the project unfolded.
 
After spending much time with Mogami’s sculpture, Dunhill and O’Brien attempted to describe it in words. They then relinquished control of that description, giving the same text to more than one hundred people in London and Tokyo. Each person was given one kilo of clay and thirty minutes to make an object based on the description.
 
This was less a process of transcription than an accumulation of interpretations, misunderstandings, inventions and acts of focused daydreaming. More than one hundred distinctly different objects emerged, a library of forms generated from the same ten paragraphs.
 
The clay forms were captured through photogrammetry and 3D printed. In the apparently frictionless space of the computer they were then amalgamated into one improbable collective object – a digital ‘mash-up’.

 

APPARATUS
The ease of this digital merger was followed by something considerably more cumbersome. Dunhill and O’Brien built a 5.5 metre-long pantograph, based on a nineteenth-century sculptor’s enlarging tool, and spent five days using it to scrutinise, enlarge and translate the mash-up by hand.
 
The resulting plaster sculpture carried something of everyone who had taken part, although no individual contribution remained readily identifiable. It was at once collective and stubbornly physical.
 
The final installation brought together the large plaster sculpture and its smaller digital ancestor, linked on motorised turntables; the pantograph and wooden gantry; the library of more than one hundred 3D-printed forms; a subtitled film of the descriptive text; and a pinboard mapping some of the research and references that had accumulated around the project.

 

‘MATA IROHA’ また いろは translated into English becomes ‘Once More the Basics’
 
Method & Apparatus to Appreciate Iroha (MATA IROHA) was made for the exhibition Pleasure in Making at Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum. The exhibition, curated by Hayato Fujioka, ran from July to October 2025, following residencies hosted by Kaetsu Ariake High School and HAKUTEN, Tokyo.
 

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:
Dunhill and O’Brien would like to thank The Daiwa Anglo Japanese Foundation and Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum for supporting this project.
 
Special thanks are also due to: the exhibition’s curator Hayato Fujioka and the curatorial team, and team of Tobira, at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Art; to Yoshinori Takakura and the team at Kaetsu Ariake Junior High School; to Yousuke Nakazato and the team at HAKUTEN; to sculptor Claire Fujita who acted as project assistant and analogue technician, and to architectural technologist and digital expert Hiroaki Yamane.
 
PROJECT PARTICIPANTS
Dunhill and O’Brien would also like to express their thanks to all the project participants for their openness and ingenuity:
Tomoko Ido; Mariko Igari; Satoshi Ikeda; Sakuya Ishida; Mayumi Ishizawa; Nick Eagleton; Yumi Hayashi; Keiko Haseyama; Nicolai Hart-Hansen; Jeremy Herbert; Satomi Baba; Angela Baum; John Barker; Parata Kikuchi Kiwa; Akiko Nishida; Mika Nishiyama; Charlotte Hodes; Mick Hawksworth; Nick Haeffner; Nick Heaf; Sarah Baylis; Steve Bell; Deborah Paige; Masami Tougasa; Penny Driver; Lau Tong Han; Owen Leach; Nathalie de Leval; Rempei Washizu; Junpei Kaneko; Marisa Kageyama; Marjorie Allthorpe-Guyton; Julia Galvin; Takumi Takahashi; Yoshinori Takakura; Rie Tanabe; James Dunhill; Becky Leddy; Miyako Someya; Fang Chol Seo; Hiromi Nemoto; Mina Nakagawa; Yosuke Nakazato; Takehide Murakami; Rena Murata; Reo Murase; Junko Uchiyama; Ren Wolfe; Sachiko Ueda; Rie Umemura; Hiroaki Umemura; Sarah Wigglesworth; Reiko Nogami; Sean O’ Brien; Utaha Kurokawa; Hiromi Kubota; Yumiko Kuramochi; Clare Cooper; Graham Cooper; Hiroaki Yamane; Daisuke Yamanaka; Azumi Matsumoto; Agalis Manessi; Sandie Macrae; Dorian McFarland; Rob Kessler; Pat Frik; Helen Frik; Claire Fujita; Hayato Fujioka; Jem Finer; Marcia Farquhar; Mick Finch; George Blacklock; John Plowman; Komada Naoki; Paul Coldwell; Jinx Godfrey; Melanie Gautier; Aya Endo; Judo Tezuka; Jeremy Till; Paul Dale; Richard Ireland; Danielle Arnaud; Yuko Aono; Naoyo Asano; Sonia Ashmore; Jonathan Ashmore; Shuori Saito; Dani Salvatori; Anna Sasaki; Hiroko Kihara; Momoko Kihara; Douglas Gill; Miina Takezawa; Yuki Miyake; Miyoko Shigeta; Kate James; Takako Jin; Nicola Streeten; Gill Smith.
 
(names listed according to the I, RO, HA ordering system, thanks to Iku Fujioka)
 
The exhibition Pleasure in Making curated by Hayato Fujioka featured works by: Taku Hisamura; Kengo Noguchi; Dunhill and O’Brien; Natsumi Seo; Kurumi Wakaki with architectural practices Akihiro Ito and studiomegane.

Dunhill and O’Brien’s ongoing series of short films, collectively titled The Sculpture Stories emerges from a succession of small, everyday epiphanies.
 
These moments are prompted by an eclectic range of encounters and memories: squashed frogs on a road in Thailand; linoleum samples used as draught-proofing by an octogenarian; endlessly recycled balls of wool; a radio sound-effects studio visited in 1963; a sleepless night spent worrying about a sculpture; a cartoon about Henry Moore; an art tutor’s advice on avoiding overworking; tools handled by an eight-year-old; the Reader’s Digest Repair Manual; and a sculpture professor’s belief in the transformational power of the plinth.
 
Each film attempts to capture a moment when something profoundly sculptural is revealed about the world, or when something unexpectedly worldly is revealed about sculpture. Along the way, a quietly personal account of what it means to think through sculpture emerges.
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

To accompany their large-scale installation MATA IROHA in the exhibition Pleasure in Making at Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, Dunhill and O’Brien created a series of smaller interactive works. Rather than asking visitors simply to look at sculpture, Feeling invited them to explore it through touch, conversation and collaborative description. Sited in a gallery space curated by the architectural labs Akihiro Ito and studiomegane, the following invitation was made to visitors:
 

“We have often overheard visitors to sculpture exhibitions mention that they would like to have a tactile relationship with the work, that they want to be able to touch it. We have even spotted some people quietly reaching out to feel a sculpture when the invigilator’s back has been turned.
 
We invite you to explore some forms before or after seeing them in the next-door gallery. Please take your time – these are complicated objects that have some pointed details as well as softer undulations. We recommend that you move your hands gently and with some caution over the surface while you become familiar with their varied shapes and textures.
 
If you would like to take this experience to the next level, you could collaborate with a friend or another exhibition visitor. Try describing the object you are feeling in words so that they can make a drawing, why not take it in turns. There are some paper and pencils provided for this purpose…”
 

The invitation extended beyond the gallery. Each exhibition catalogue contained a pack of air-drying paper clay together with suggestions for making, allowing visitors to continue the experience of handling and thinking through sculpture at home.
 

 

A half day public workshop resulted in the Iroha Parade, another way of appreciating Mogami’s sculpture. Working with recycled materials, participants of all ages made costumes and improvised artefacts, and worked with a portable structure carrying an image of the sculpture. Together these were taken in procession from Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum into Ueno Park and back again.
 
The parade drew on Dunhill and O’Brien’s longstanding interest in processions in which sculpture and other significant objects are transported. From local carnivals and religious festivals to civic celebrations, these events shift sculpture away from the distance of contemplation. Instead, it steps away from its perch and enters the crowd, where it may be carried, jostled and even manhandled.
 

with project support from the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum and the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation

Terms & Conditions grew out of a year of repeat visits to Stoke-on-Trent, during which Dunhill and O’Brien interviewed local people, ran workshops, tested ideas and generally tried to discover what other people’s hands knew that theirs did not. Made for AirSpace Gallery as part of the British Ceramics Biennial 2019, the project culminated in a three-week residency working with people they had come to know over the preceding year, including a dentist, dressmaker, boulderer, sports masseur, translator, jeweller, baker and engineer.
 
Each participant brought a different store of practical knowledge: ways of judging pressure, balance, texture, fit, weight, resistance and the occasional awkward gap. Working with raw clay, they agreed to leave the safer ground of their own expertise and take part in a sequence of propositions.
 
For example:
 

Two people stand behind a screen. One person feels a rock and describes how to make a portrait of it; the other has a block of clay and attempts to follow the instructions. Meanwhile, all the instructions are recorded for future use.
 
Five people sit in a circle with a rock before them on a slowly moving turntable. They begin with a block of clay and modelling tools and, at five-minute intervals, pass the partly formed object to the person on their right. After everyone has worked on every form, they stop and look at their collaborative sculptures. These are then displayed together in a damp-store shelving system.

 
The propositions took place inside a purpose-built modular Dexion structure: workshop, laboratory and storage system.
 
In the final proposition, Dunhill and O’Brien placed themselves back inside the process, attempting to make together from the tangle of other people’s instructions. What began with a few apparently modest rocks became a way of thinking about touch, translation, creative ownership and the peculiar business of making something with somebody else.
 
The exhibition gathered together the unfired clay objects, films and transcribed instructions, alongside the three and a half tonne clay sculpture within and around the construction. Meanwhile, workshops continued, offering visitors a range of opportunities to explore the propositions and add their own interpretations to the growing collection.
 
As the exhibition closed, Dunhill and O’Brien invited people in Stoke-on-Trent to take away clay that had been carefully tended and kept damp throughout the month-long exhibition. People arrived by car, bus and on foot to claim some for their own creative projects. Every bag was taken.
 

With very special thanks to the project participants: Ayad Al-Ani, Melissa Beardmore, Silvia Cotelea–Cazacu, Joanna Dawidowska, Sarah Delvari Zadeh, Steve James, Taraneh Noroozi Farsangi, Shelia Podmore, Anna Robinson, Leo Robinson, Len Robinson, John Shapter, Emma Tunnell, Asal Vahedi, and to Sophie Ashcroft, Sandy Auden, Lynn Davis, Genesis Rowley and Claire Stewart for input during preliminary workshop testing.
 
We would also like to thank Gavin Birkin and Pete Smith for pitching in to help shift a tonnage of clay and to John Plowman and Glen Stoker for their practical and professional help and their generous encouragement and insight throughout the development and realisation of the project.

 

This project was supported by the Arts Council England and Valentine Clays Limited, with professional support from Beacon Projects and AirSpace Gallery.

 

Proposition 1 (Window)
Collection of clay objects made collaboratively by participants, kept damp through a sprinkler system, and added to following workshop sessions held during the exhibition.

 

Proposition 2 (Sitting)
Making spaces for up to 4 seated participants. The central unit designed for two people to model the same clay object together (filmed from above); the two units on either side are for individual making (filmed from the side). Small LED screens show images used as source material. The proposition is to understand and translate the 2-dimensional images into 3 dimensional forms, solely employing tactile interpretation.

 

Proposition 3 (Standing)
Making space for two participants standing side by side, with a shared tabletop unit (filmed from the front). There are two options with this proposition. In the first, a participant describes how to make a rock they are exploring through touch for up to 20 minutes, while the other uses tactile interpretation to model it in clay. In the second version a participant, at an adjoining workspace, observes and gives instructions to two participants at the standing unit, who model versions of the same object in tandem for approximately 20 minutes.

 

Proposition 4 (Table)
Making space for up to 5 participants employed for an introductory exercise. This session is not filmed though the outcomes are kept and displayed. In the centre of a large table area a small rock (flint) rotates very slowly on a turntable. Each participant models a clay form based on the flint for 5 minutes before swapping places to work on their neighbour’s clay model for 5 minutes. This exchange continues until each member of the group has been involved in modelling every one of the clay objects. Adjoining the table is a sink as well as a storage area for the aprons and tools used by the participants.

 

Proposition 5 (Shelf)
Collection of collaborative clay objects made from Proposition 4 (Table). This collection will be added to during the exhibition following further workshop sessions. Stored on the shelf are also various rocks that have been employed in Proposition 3 (Standing).

 

Proposition 6 (Video monitor)
A video documenting Proposition 3 (Standing), duration 3.5 hours.

 

Proposition 7 (How to Make a Rock – Object)
3 tonne clay sculpture made over an 8-hour period by Dunhill and O’Brien, employing sound recordings from Proposition 3 (Standing) where different participants describe how to make a rock in clay.

Proposition 8 (How to Make a Rock – Text)
A number of texts transcribing the recorded descriptions made by a number of participants during Proposition 3 (Standing).

Proposition 9 (How to Make a Rock – Video)
A video documenting the process involved in Proposition 7 (How to Make a Rock – Object).  Duration 1hour

Digging a hole in the ground is a practical task. For millennia humans have dug holes for many reasons: to drain water from land; to lay foundations; to plant food supplies; deal with waste; make storage space, and to create space for tombs and graves.
 

In June 2002 during a residency at the European Ceramic Work Centre (EKWC), Dunhill and O’Brien posted a small ad in the Brabants Dagblad newspaper offering to dig holes for free. Five residents from the s’Hertogenbosch area invited them to their gardens, farms and allotments seeking holes for various purposes.
 

Each time Dunhill and O’Brien dug a hole they cast it in plaster. This resulted in a collection of inverted plaster objects documenting the impressions of their labour. Moulds were made of the resulting abstract sculptural forms and these were cast to become a group of large-scale ceramic sculptures made using locally sourced clay.
 

This artwork, Holes II, was later transported to the UK where it was exhibited a few times before going into storage. In 2022 they were invited to temporarily site the work at the Grange in Norfolk, while they formed an intention to finally return the large multi-part sculpture to the earth.
 

Fortunately, the owners of the Grange enjoyed the idea of taking ownership of a sculpture that remained out of sight, and contracts were drawn up to set out both the terms of ownership (i.e. that the artwork should remain buried for at least fifteen years) and the rights of the artists (to a burial plot for the same duration).
A commemorative plaque and wildflower planting can be visited at the site of the burial at the Grange. The ‘what3words’ location is: //bucket.tomb.shook
 

The limited edition commemorative booklet produced following the burial in July 2024 is available as a digital flipbook below.
 

 
There were two artworks resulting from the hole digging project in s’Hertogenbosch the other work, Holes I, is documented here.
 

The residency at EKWC was supported by South West Arts and University of the West of England.

Dunhill and O’Brien made the short film Bad Idea for the Bad Ideas Collective, a project initially led by Kristaps Ancans and Alex Shady during the lockdown in 2020.
 

The film turns its attention to some of the less publicly acknowledged aspects of collaborative practice namely, disagreement, competition, jealousy, compromise and the uncomfortable suspicion that the other person’s idea may actually be better than one’s own. Using humour and self-scrutiny, Bad Idea unpicks some of the awkward dynamics of working as an artist duo and the persistent question of where one person’s thinking ends and the other’s begins.
 

The full series of Bad Ideas Collective short films can be viewed here, or Bad Idea can be watched below.

 

 

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.

 
 
EIS: work out (10 mins 41 seconds) was created for Danielle Arnaud Gallery’s online exhibition 25 years. Filmed during lockdown in summer 2020, it returns to Examples in Sculpture first developed during a residency in Rome nearly twenty years earlier.
 
Lockdown had some resemblance to a residency. Alongside other online work commitments, Dunhill and O’Brien yearned for physical tasks that would break up the day, establish a routine and provide some exercise. The original Examples in Sculpture had emerged during a heatwave, when the conditions reduced what they were physically capable of; EIS: work out responded to confinement.
 
In the earlier work they face one another and are fully visible. Here they face away from each other in separate cubicles, with only their work shoes visible. The competitive element remains, but now each can only hear and feel what the other is doing through the rope connecting them.
 
 

 
HIDE was made for m2, an architect-designed pavilion that hovers between the private and public space of what could otherwise be a driveway in Peckham. For the duration of the exhibition, the pavilion took a rest from presenting artworks in its vitrine windows. Instead, Dunhill and O’Brien crafted a tailor-made blue tarpaulin jacket that covered all its external and internal surfaces. Meanwhile, a film made from their growing collection of photographs of blue tarpaulin encountered on their travels was shown in the window gallery next to the pavilion.
 
Polyethylene is an oil-based material. Woven polyethylene tarpaulins are used globally, with lightweight blue tarpaulin among the most ubiquitous.This vivid blue material frequently punctuates human habitation while somehow remaining almost invisible. It covers and protects things, hiding them in plain sight while creating new and sometimes intriguing forms. It is used to keep farming equipment dry; provide improvised shelter after disasters; cover stacks of logs, boats and freshly made tombs; smother weeds on allotments; protect the possessions of homeless people; cover sculpture packing cases in leaking storage units; and weatherproof random objects transported on pick-up trucks.
 
The intended afterlife of the m2 pavilion jacket proved rather more complicated. Dunhill and O’Brien researched how the used tarpaulin could be reprocessed rather than simply discarded. Their eventual plan was to take it to Tokyo during a later residency and work with a laboratory using thermochemical decomposition to convert the polyethylene back into oil. The jacket was cleaned, cut into 30 cm squares, packed and transported to Tokyo, but changes to the residency schedule and other circumstances intervened and the process never happened. Eventually they accepted defeat and the material entered Tokyo’s recycling system.

 

video stills from HIDE

In 2021, peripatetic curator Sandie Macrae established PostROOM in her home off Essex Road, London, making exhibitions within a functioning domestic space that included the kitchen, dining area and garden shed.
 
For their solo exhibition Modern Object in November 2022, Dunhill and O’Brien responded to the character of the house and its furniture with a group of new works poised awkwardly between sculpture, furniture and clothing, alongside objects from their own collection and earlier works. Made during an extended period in which circumstances had confined them unusually closely to the studio, these new works developed an alarmingly impractical relationship to the body and to domestic usefulness.
 
A large upholstered shelving unit, for example, could be worn and carried using backpack-like shoulder straps, although its considerable weight made the proposition an ordeal rather than a convenience. The smaller What-Not combined a backpack with a portable display shelf, drawing on different traditions of carrying and displaying valued objects.In Shielding, an upholstered form replicating Macrae’s kitchen table could be worn like an oversized shield, but presented on the wall with empty sleeves dangling became more mournful. Elsewhere, matching backpacks were apparently reconfigured into compact modernist sculptures — one pierced by a hole, another equipped with a projecting staff.
 
The awkward combination of ornament, burden and improbable utility connected the new works to objects and images in Dunhill and O’Brien’s collection. Among them was a nineteenth-century Chinese pith painting depicting a couple confined in a cangue — an image in which clothing, structure and restraint become uneasily entangled.

 
Click here for a list of titles and other information.

 

From 750 words a week, a blog by art writer Paul O’Kane
 
“Most of their work reveals a head-on negotiation, not only with each other but with the underlying concepts and context of their duality, their ‘two-ness’ and their collaboration. This includes examination of the way that idea-production, conceptual refinement, design and manufacture all take place in an especially candid and visible arena once artists choose, or are forced to work outside the more private confines of a more typical practice.
Suffice to say that the works of these collaborating artists always provoke intrigue, fascination and amusement while often delivering a special and memorable sense of bathos. Dunhill & O’Brien also demonstrate that much humour tends to derive from such collaboration.”
 
photography by Andrew Watson