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 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, 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 more than thirty nineteenth-century Fuji-like mounds in the Kanto region to measuring ‘celebrity’ boulders in the British countryside; from inviting 100 participants to translate a written description of a sculpture into clay forms, to publicly advertising themselves as artists who dig holes for free. The resulting works—whether installations, short films, performative actions or sculptural objects—often expose the ordinary frictions, pleasures, competitiveness, doubt, embarrassment and surprise that accompany two people trying to think, look and make together.
Dunhill and O’Brien have received awards from the Arts Council England, the Art & Humanities Research Council, and the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation. Their work has been presented at venues including the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, Kunstvereniging Diepenheim, Das Weisse Haus, Tallinn Art Hall, Danielle Arnaud Gallery, AirSpace Gallery for the British Ceramic Biennial, and the Setouchi Triennale.
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