DUNHILL AND O’BRIEN
Mark Dunhill and Tamiko O’Brien began their collaboration in 1998 following what was intended to be a one-off joint project at Cable Street Gallery, London. Rather than providing a temporary diversion from their individual practices, the collaboration became an ongoing exploration of the dilemmas and possibilities of making sculpture together.
Their work ranges from large public and architectural interventions to hand-sized multiples, and moves between sculpture, film, photography, text, performative actions and participatory projects. It is often developed in response to particular sites, materials, people and circumstances.
Their shared preoccupation with the troubling logistics of sculpture, how it is packed, moved, stored and disposed of, and with the ways it is encountered and appreciated has led them to devise methods of working that continually push them beyond their own habits, comfort zones and aesthetic judgements. Employing invented procedures, kinetic devices and, at times, the participation of others, they use making itself as a way of looking more closely, leaving room for chance and (mis)interpretation.
Residencies in Rome, ’s-Hertogenbosch, Kyoto, Tokyo and Stoke-on-Trent have immersed them in the practical and cultural realities of making work in unfamiliar contexts. Their projects have ranged from visiting thirty-three nineteenth-century Fuji-like mounds in the Kanto region to measuring ‘celebrity’ boulders in the British countryside; from working with 100 participants to translate a sculpture through language and clay, to publicly advertising themselves as artists who dig holes for free. The resulting works often expose the ordinary frictions, pleasure, competitiveness, doubt, embarrassment and surprise that accompany people trying to think, look and make together.
Dunhill and O’Brien have received support from Arts Council England, the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation and the Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation. Their work has been presented at Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum; Tallinn Art Hall, Estonia; Das Weisse Haus, Vienna; Kunstvereniging Diepenheim, the Netherlands; Crawford Art Gallery, Cork; Danielle Arnaud Gallery, London; and AirSpace Gallery for the British Ceramic Biennial.
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