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STONE APPRECIATION 1

It was a postcard of a painting made in 1868 by the romantic painter John Atkinson Grimshaw that prompted Dunhill and O’Brien’s initial interest in the Bowder Stone. More than the style of painting or the boulder itself however, it was the addition of a staircase leading to the top of the rock that caught their attention – turning an otherwise impressive natural phenomenon into a poignant architectural form, here was a rock posing as both a pulpit and viewing platform. In one of the most ‘unspoilt’ areas of England (the famous Lake District) there is a stone that has been domesticated, and designated as a tourist destination.

For their solo show at the Gallery Fleur in Kyoto, they presented a sculpture consisting of seventy metres of cotton calico formed like a dressmaker’s toile directly on the top section of the Bowder Stone. This detailed and tailored prototype, somewhat oversized for the gallery space, was supported by an elaborate construction of wooden props and sand bags over a paper pattern.

Meanwhile the Stone Appreciation Study Room, made with the participation of Kyoto Seika University’s Fine Art students involved a collection of images and objects relating to the cultural status of stones, from the Blarney Stone in Ireland, to the Torpedo Rock of Australia, the Balanced Rock of Colorado to Kyoto’s own Ryoanji rocks, in this case as a woven image on a cushion cover.

SCULPTOMATIC 2

This work was made for the Kunstvereniging Diepenheim in Diepenheim, Holland and shown in the same month as Sculptomatic 1. It employed locally sourced clay and responded to the particular architecture of this unusual purpose-built Sculpture Gallery.

The work involved a Dexion constructed ‘dumb waiter ‘lift used to transport the clay forms based on 500 images of sculptures with holes in, made by Dutch and UK participants, to an upper level of the gallery. There a motorised conveyor belt stretched across the space overhanging the main space somewhat like a diving board so that the clay forms once placed on it were transported to a point 5 metres above the ground floor gallery space where they dropped in to a large vitrine.

The exhibition, like Sculptomatic 1, comprised all of the working mechanisms and materials used to make the clay Sculpture and included a 2-hour video of the vitrine as the sculpture slowly formed along with a presentation of the photographs of each of the clay forms before their journey.

This project was made possible through funding by the Arts Council England, Kunstvereniging Diepenheim and the University of the West of England.

SCULPTOMATIC 1

The basic proposition of this complicated and convoluted work was to make a new clay sculpture that would be a ‘meeting place of different cultures and times in the history of sculpture’. The work developed from a preoccupation with the status of holes in sculpture and further elaborated a system intended to enable the avoidance of any interference of personal taste or the ‘hand of the artist’.

A crew of 20 participants were employed to make clay models at a rate of five per hour based on 500 images of sculptures, ranging from prehistoric ritual objects to contemporary artworks, selected because they had some form of hole in them. These images had been manipulated to remove any reference to scale, location or other contextual information.

Once modelled the freshly made clay forms were photographed before being placed on wooden trays that moved slowly around an inclined elevator. At a height of approximately five metres the forms dropped into a display case (at a rate of one every thirty seconds) where they accumulated and fused together to form the new Sculpture.

The final installation of the work included all of the materials and work spaces involved with a 4-hour video showing the vitrine with the sculpture slowly forming.

This project was made possible through funding by the Arts Council England, The James Hockey Gallery and the University of the West of England.

ROCK DRAWING

Drawing in its widest sense is central to our practice. We use it as a way of instigating, egging on, planning, researching, measuring, disrupting, packing, administrating, transporting, problematising, de-problematising, installing and de-installing our work. In our attempts to collaborate drawing is employed to communicate ideas and test propositions. Sketches, diagrams, notes, manipulated photographs and objects of various kinds are shuttled back and forth between us as part of our ongoing negotiations. We tend to work together on three-dimensional drawings (models and studio ‘mock-ups’) in order to test things out and identify pitfalls. Drawing for us then, is usually a messy by-product of our thinking and making process, an easily overlooked record of disagreements, U-turns, practical solutions and instructions.

Rock Drawing comprises a number of elements (two-dimensional, three-dimensional and time based) produced at different stages in the process of making Rock, a work completed in 2009. Collectively these drawings form a narrative about Rock, while referring to a narrative about a sculpture by Isamu Noguchi.

When we came across the American/Japanese artist/designer’s largest and heaviest sculpture, Thunder Rock in March 2009, we were intrigued and concerned by its physical awkwardness and nomadic existence. Noguchi carved this seven-foot high, 15-tonne, granite boulder, quarried in Mure on the Japanese island of Shikoku, in 1981 in response to a commission for a plaza in Philadelphia. Its US based commissioner was unable to complete the purchase and it was returned to Japan, eventually travelling three times across the pacific in search of a viable home. It is currently in storage with no plans for a permanent location.

Sculpture is usually clearly in and of the world but often presented as having a different kind of presence. We have been pre-occupied by this particular paradox for some time; it is something that we find both poignant and troubling and Thunder Rock struck us as a vivid example of this. Noguchi’s stated intention was to reveal something elemental in the rock that might transcend the banalities of everyday life and commerce, however the logistics of repeatedly crating, shipping and storing the work, with its expanding carbon footprint and related paper trail also locates it as a weighty piece of commercial freight.

Our full size transcription of this sculpture, based upon memory, photographic documentation and written descriptions from the Internet, was less physically challenging. Tailored in ‘distressed’ beige and cream leatherette to match the carved and un-carved surfaces of the granite, our Rock proved to be the correct size and weight when folded to be stowed as cabin luggage. Like an out-sized Pakamac or sports holdall it travelled with us Economy Class to Tokyo before our trip to visit the quarry in Mure. Back in Tokyo and fully upholstered we cautiously wheeled this ungainly object through the back streets of Nishi Ogikubo to its temporary location in a picturesque spot overlooking the lake in Zempukuji Park. This convoluted journey, avoiding the steep hill between the studio and park was itself a physical drawing, ‘performed’ on a quiet Thursday in early November.

NEW JAPANESE OBJECT

The New Fuji in Meguro, a woodcut by Hiroshige Utagawa (1797-1858), depicts a small group of people standing on a Fuji shaped mound looking across a landscape at the distant Mountain. This image portrays one of over a thousand ‘Fujizuka’, made during the Edo period (1603 to 1868) in the Kanto region by groups of Fuji devotees known as Fuji-ko. At that time when women and the infirm were not permitted or able to climb the sacred mountain, these constructions were built for the local community, to simulate the experience of climbing the final and most sacred stage of Fuji.

Fujizuka were constructed of tonnes of lava rocks collected and transported from the volcano. Unlike the European landscape garden with picturesque elements, the Fujizuka is a humble, human-scale fragment, of this most potent symbol of Japan. Ranging from one to thirty metres high, each Fuji-ko group’s interpretation of the Mountain was specific and unique. Using the Tokyo Street Atlas and guidance from friends and strangers O’Brien located and visited thirty six of the fifty Fujizuka still existing in Tokyo. Incongruous and often obscured among high-rise offices and apartments each site was surveyed and photographed. Capturing detailed images of the imported lava rocks and other stones provided the raw material for a work developed later in London and in the residency studio in Tokyo in July 2014.

New Japanese Object is made from life size printed images of Fujizuka rocks mounted on thick cardboard and carefully positioned on a construction made from furniture and salvaged wood. A video documents the two artists working on the assembly of this armature of material gathered from their studio and apartment. Made without discussion, agreement or prior planning, the video reveals a creative process that resembles the circumnavigation of two workers carrying out often-repeated tasks. Meanwhile the flat-pack, ‘cardboard cut outs’, the antithesis of sculptural form, all but filled the remaining space.

EXAMPLES IN SCULPTURE

During a 3-month residency at the British School at Rome in the heat-wave of summer 2003, Dunhill and O’Brien attempted to develop a method of modelling sculptures together using minimal physical effort in the heavy heat of their studio.

The simple devices they constructed were used to repeatedly drop rocks found in the vicinity on to mounds of soft clay. The hollows or depressions made in the clay were later filled with plaster and then inverted and fitted on to tailor-made bases reminiscent of classical stands used for portrait busts. The bases served to elevate these lowly forms, swapping the gravitational impact (of the rocks on the clay) for a more aspirational gesture.

This basic process was repeated with some variations in different locations, for example Sculpture 5 used 2 basalt cobble stones, 150 kilos of clay, 2 mosquito nets and was carried out in a small park on Via Gramsci, while Sculpture 3 used 1 irregular piece of travertine stone, 200 kilos of clay and was carried out in Studio 5, of the British School at Rome.

The process was filmed and photographed and presented alongside the objects to form a manual of their working process.

HOLES 1

Dunhill and O’Brien consider holes to be the unsung heroes of 20th Century Sculpture. While the ‘readymade’ has generated much discussion and been given full credit for its importance, holes have been largely overlooked.

At the start of their 3-month residency at the European Ceramic Work Centre in s’Hertogenbosch, Holland, they advertised in a local paper as artists who would dig holes for free. In this way they met some generous and accommodating people who allowed them to dig holes in their gardens, allotments and on their farmland.

The physical act of digging also offered a way of making that was truly collaborative. The resulting holes were not particularly remarkable, they were governed by the kind of soil and location and the use that the landowner hoped to make of the hole.

Hole digging, however, was just the start of a laborious process that resulted in two distinct works.

In this work, Holes 1, a number of plaster forms were mounted on steel frames with spindles and belts attached to a motor so that they slowly turned together. This offered a solution to the difficulty of presentation as the forms endlessly re-arranged themselves, placed in a configuration that was based upon the least distance possible given the irregularity of their shapes.

HOLES 2

Dunhill and O’Brien’s residency at the European Ceramic Work Centre (EKWC) led to two works both based on the same initial ‘fieldwork’. This involved advertising in a local paper as artists who would dig holes for free and then time spent digging and casting the holes that local people required.

In Holes 2 the opportunity of working with clay and the inevitability of firing and glazing it got the better of their more practical inclinations. The kilns at EKWC are very large and this gave a parameter for the largest cast hole dug for a farmer in the local area. Where Holes 1 was in constant movement, Holes 2 had a heavy and inert quality that was belied by the sugary pink glaze.

USEFUL BENCH

In order to collaborate on small clay sculptures Dunhill and O’Brien constructed a long bench so that they could take turns in modelling and sculpting the same clay form. Each artist was designated twenty minutes in which to work before the clay form was conveyed by a pulley device to the other end of the bench.

Faced in turn with the already partly modelled form they found themselves compelled to completely alter and deface the other’s work until it was once again recognisably their own. Inevitably they could not agree upon when to finish making the work, each preferring their own latest efforts.

The Useful Bench is a souvenir of this working process. At timed intervals a plasticene lump slowly travels via a motor along a shelf in front of a miniature billboard with a projected image of the artists at work.

GATES

During their 3-month residency at the BSR in the summer of 2003 Dunhill and O’Brien found that the slow and stately movement of the electric gates at the back of the studios was in stark contrast to the pace of almost everything else in Rome.

Rome has various foreign academies and institutes; these cultural outposts were each established to enable their scholars to study the history, art and archaeology of Rome while also promoting their own culture. Dunhill and O’Brien couldn’t help noticing that these other institutions also had some fine examples of slow-moving electric gates.

With varying degrees of success they obtained permission to film some of the gates (the American, French and Egyptian Academies considered it too great a security risk). The gates were filmed opening and closing (without any traffic passing through them) once from the outside looking in and once from the inside looking out and, as theatre curtains determine whether we are the audience or the performers, so the viewers position in relation to the gates is made to repeatedly shift between outsider and insider.

While there was a certain degree of collector’s enthusiasm to this enterprise, something about the status of culture in the different countries was also revealed.