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Method and Apparatus to Appreciate Iroha (MATA IROHA) began with an apparently simple question: how might the act of looking at a sculpture be prolonged? In an age of fleeting attention, when studies suggest that the average time spent looking at an artwork is around ten seconds, Dunhill and O’Brien devised a process that enabled them to attend more fully to a sculpture in the museum’s collection that had quietly caught their attention. Over the course of the project, I, RO, HA…N completed in 1979 by Mogami Hisayuki, became their conversational partner.
 
That conversation grew into a method and apparatus involving more than one hundred participants in a chain of translations—from object to language, to clay, to digital information, and back again into sculpture. Through this sequence of translations, the artists, together with others, repeatedly encountered, interpreted and physically engaged with the original work. The process itself became a collaborator—perhaps even the author—of a second sculpture. It became Dunhill and O’Brien’s way of appreciating, questioning and responding to I, RO, HA…N through sculpture itself.
 

METHOD
A research visit to Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum shaped two key aspects of the project. It confirmed Iroha, a sculpture first encountered on the museum’s website, as its focus. It also led to the construction of a life-size (1:1) platform and wall structure based on the dimensions of their London studio. Within Mayekawa Kunio’s monumental 1975 sculpture gallery, the platform became both a familiar making space and a raft-like plinth for the work.
 
Meeting the basalt sculpture IRL proved to be a powerful experience. I, RO, HA…N is a boulder quite literally inscribed with language. Its title refers to an 11th Century poem, Iroha (いろは), sometimes ascribed to the Buddhist philosopher Kūkai (空海) (774–835). It is a perfect pangram containing each of the 47 kana syllables that make up the Japanese language. By carving these kana characters into raw basalt, Mogami translated its philosophical ideas into sculptural form.
 

Contemplating Mogami’s sculpture Dunhill and O’Brien wrote a descriptive text reflecting on its physicality. This same text was used by over one hundred people during visits to their studio in London and workshops held in Tokyo. Equipped only with the description, 1 kilo of clay, and thirty minutes, each produced a distinct three-dimensional form.
 

Each of these clay objects was carefully studied and captured using photogrammetry. A 3D printer transformed this digital information back into a series of objects. Then in the virtual space of a computer the same forms were amalgamated to generate a ‘mash-up’, a single collective object.
 

The final stage of the method saw this ‘mash-up’ scrutinised with the help of a 3D pantograph.
 
APPARATUS
Dunhill and O’Brien used their home-made pantograph, based on a nineteenth-century sculptor’s tool, over a five-day period to plot and enlarge the ‘mash-up’ to a scale closer to Mogami’s sculpture. Employing traditional sculpture techniques and materials, they gave physical form to the conversation with I, RO, HA…N
 

MATA IROHA

Abbreviation ‘MATA IROHA’ また いろは translated back into English becomes ‘Once More the Basics’

 
The installation comprised the platform with framed wall structures, the large-scale plaster sculpture on a motorised turntable attached via a chain and motor to the ‘mash-up’ on a smaller turntable; the 5.5 metre long 3D pantograph with its 3.5 metre high wooden gantry; a 3.33 minute subtitle video of the descriptive text; the library of over one hundred 3D printed forms; and a pinboard documenting visual research and references.
Materials employed included wood, plaster, steel, chicken wire, cardboard, plant-based plastic filament, an electric motor geared to run at 1RPM (turning for 1 minute every 30 minutes), rope, sand weights, a monitor, photographic prints and photocopies, and map pins.

Method and 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’s participation in the exhibition Pleasure in Making was made possible thanks to financial support from The Daiwa Anglo Japanese Foundation and Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum.
 
Special thanks are due to: Yoshinori Takakura and the team at Kaetsu Ariake Junior High School; Yousuke Nakazato and the team at HAKUTEN; the exhibition’s curator Hayato Fujioka and the curatorial team and team of Tobira at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Art; sculptor Claire Fujita who acted as project assistant and analogue technician, and architectural technologist Hiroaki Yamane who provided expert digital support.
 
PROJECT PARTICIPANTS
Dunhill and O’Brien would also like to express their thanks to 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 featured works by: Taku Hisamura; Kengo Noguchi; Dunhill and O’Brien; Natsumi Seo; Kurumi Wakiki with architectural practices Akihiro Ito and studiomegane.

Dunhill and O’Brien’s ongoing series of short films, collectively titled The Sculpture Stories emerge 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 invigilators 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 is 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.
 

TERMS & CONDITIONS

 
Terms & Conditions grew out of almost 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 Dunhill and O’Brien had devised with them in mind. The propositions involved making without looking; one person describing a rock while another attempted to model it; and, in others, images, words and half-made objects being passed from one pair of hands to another. The point was not to arrive at the right answer—there was no particularly convincing way to do that—but to see what might emerge when familiar skills were put to unfamiliar use.
 
The propositions took place inside a purpose-built modular Dexion structure: part workshop, part laboratory and part overgrown shelving system. The exhibition gathered together damp, unfired clay objects made by the participants, films and transcribed instructions, and the functioning workshop, which offered visitors opportunities to add their own interpretations to the growing collection. Rocks—found, photographed, filmed and repeatedly handled—sat in and among the installation, connecting the project to the artists’ long-standing fascination with naturally formed stones as both physical objects and persistent cultural presences.
 
In the final proposition, Dunhill and O’Brien placed themselves back inside the process, attempting to make together from a tangle of other people’s words. What began with a few modest rocks became a way of thinking about touch, translation, negative space and the peculiar business of making something with somebody else.

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

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.

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 ‘what 3 words’ location is: //bucket.tomb.shook
 

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

 
NB. there were in fact two artworks resulting from the hole digging project in s’Hertogenbosch the other work, HOLES I, is documented here.
 

Dunhill and O’Brien made the short video Bad Idea for the Bad Ideas Collective project curated by Kristaps Ancans and Alex Shady during the Lockdown of 2020.

The full series of Bad Ideas Collective short films can be viewed here alternatively you can watch Bad Idea below.

Anthology hovered somewhere between a storage shed, a reconstruction of an artist’s studio and a mini retrospective. It was made in response to a historic malthouse building and a small museum room adjacent to the gallery where scenes from the building’s former function were reconstructed.  

 
The works featured in Anthology related to Dunhill and O’Brien’s preoccupation with naturally formed rocks, stones and boulders.
In Western culture stones and rocks often have negative associations. But there are many other cultures where rocks are venerated and used as a focus for contemplation or pilgrimage. Dunhill and O’Brien have a longstanding interest in the Japanese tradition of Suiseki translated as the Art of Stone Appreciation, here something apparently lowly and ubiquitous is treasured and given great status.
Dunhill and O’Brien have long pondered over how they can best appreciate stones.
 

Image 1: View of shed like structure including a 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
below the main carousel
Image 4: 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)

 
 
EIS: work out (10 mins 41 seconds) was made for Danielle Arnaud Gallery’s online exhibition, 25 years. Made during the Lockdown in summer 2020 it relates to the work Examples in Sculpture made during a residency in Rome some twenty years earlier.
 
 

First invented in 1936 polyethylene is an oil-based material. Tarpaulins made of woven polyethylene went into production in the 1970s and are now used on a global scale, with blue tarpaulin as the most lightweight and ubiquitous.
 

This vivid blue material that so frequently punctuates human habitations has become almost invisible. While providing covering and protecting objects, it hides them in plain sight while creating new and intriguing forms. It is the go-to material for keeping farming equipment dry; providing improvised shelter for post-disaster situations; covering stacks of logs, boats, and freshly made tombs; smothering weeds on allotments; keeping the possessions of homeless people dry; protecting sculpture packing cases in leaking storage units and weather-proofing random items transported on pick-up trucks.
 

As an architectural object the m2 pavilion hovers between the private and public space of what could otherwise be a driveway. This unique and somewhat eccentric art space temporarily took a rest from presenting artworks in its vitrine windows for the duration of Dunhill and O’Brien’s exhibition. Instead, a tailor-made blue tarpaulin jacket covered all of its external and internal surfaces. Meanwhile, a film of their blue tarpaulin photographic collection was shown in the m2 window gallery.
 

The afterlife of this project will see the tarpaulin jacket packed and taken as luggage during a residency in Tokyo where it will be converted by thermochemical decomposition back to oil.
 

Images 1 – 3: Street views of HIDE at m2 pavilion (photo credits Andrew Watson)
Images 4-5: Window gallery with monitor screening HIDE
Images 6 – 12: Stills from HIDE video

In 2021 peripatetic curator Sandie Macrae established her home off the Essex Road in London as PostROOM, making exhibitions in a functioning domestic space including her kitchen, dining area and garden shed. For their solo show Modern Object at PostROOM in November 2022, Dunhill and O’Brien made new works employing upholstered components to respond to the modernist style of the space and furniture while inserting a number of earlier works and objects from their collection.
 
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