Galleries

                                                                       
During a three-month residency at the British School at Rome in the heat-wave summer of 2003, Dunhill and O’Brien developed Examples in Sculpture while looking for ways to make sculpture together with as little physical effort as possible in the heavy heat of their studio.
 
They constructed simple devices for repeatedly dropping rocks found nearby onto mounds of soft clay. The hollows and depressions left by the impact were filled with plaster, inverted and mounted on tailor-made bases reminiscent of the stands used for classical portrait busts. The lowly results were thus given a more elevated status, exchanging the downward force of gravity for something altogether more aspirational.
 
The same basic procedure was repeated with small variations in different locations. Sculpture IV, for example, used two basalt cobbles, 150 kilos of clay and two mosquito nets in a small park on Via Gramsci; Sculpture 3 used a single irregular piece of travertine and 200 kilos of clay in Studio 5 at the British School at Rome.
 
The actions were filmed and photographed, and shown alongside the resulting objects as a kind of manual for the process.

Object, Walk, Phone developed from three days Dunhill and O’Brien spent examining an eleventh-century bell-casting pit at a former Cistercian abbey in Tuscania, Italy. The pit had originally been made by itinerant bell founders to cast the abbey bell and was later reused as a burial place for monks.
 
What interested them was the way the original hole connected a very physical act of making with something much less tangible: the sound of the bell travelling out across the surrounding landscape, marking time and extending the authority of the abbey beyond its walls.
 
The resulting work, shown in Just World Order at Artsway Gallery in 2008, took three forms. Object was a tailor-made lining formed directly inside the bell pit. Walk was a guidebook for a route based on the estimated distance the sound of the original bell might have travelled, transposed onto the landscape around the gallery. Phone was a mobile phone programmed with the sound of a medieval bell of comparable size and weight, recorded at the Whitechapel Bell Foundry, which rang intermittently throughout the exhibition.
 
Together, the three elements shifted between material, distance and sound: from the physical shape of the hole, to the territory a bell might reach, to the sudden intrusion of its sound into the gallery.

At the beginning of a three-month residency at the European Ceramic Work Centre in ’s-Hertogenbosch, Dunhill and O’Brien placed an advert in a local newspaper offering to dig holes, free of charge, for whatever purpose might be required.

 
The offer brought them into contact with a number of generous and accommodating people who invited them to dig in gardens, allotments and farmland. Hole digging proved to be a satisfyingly collaborative way of making: the resulting forms were determined less by artistic intention than by soil conditions, location and whatever use the landowner actually had for the hole.

 
The holes themselves were only the beginning of a much more laborious process that eventually produced two separate works.

 
For Holes I, plaster forms derived from the excavations were mounted on steel frames and linked by spindles and belts to a motor, causing them to turn slowly together.

 
Dunhill and O’Brien had been unable to agree on how the completed forms should be presented as static objects, so the turning mechanism became a way of deciding how they might live together without settling on a single arrangement. The movement also echoed the potters’ wheels at the European Ceramic Work Centre, where the work had been made. Their irregular shapes continually shifted in relation to one another, held as closely together as their awkward contours would allow.

This project was made possible thanks to bursary support from South West Arts.

Dunhill and O’Brien’s residency at the European Ceramic Work Centre produced two works from the same initial fieldwork: advertising in a local newspaper as artists who would dig holes for free, then visiting local gardens, allotments and farmland to dig and cast the holes people actually required.
 
Once the casts had been made, Dunhill and O’Brien found themselves with two quite different ideas about what should happen next and, unable to agree on which to pursue, decided to make both.
 
For Holes II, the opportunity of working with clay — and the inevitability of firing and glazing it — got the better of their more practical instincts. The large kilns at EKWC set the scale for the biggest form, based on a hole dug for a local farmer.
 
Where Holes I remained in constant movement, Holes II became heavy, static and emphatically material, its inert mass slightly contradicted by a sugary pink glaze.
 

This project was supported by South West Arts and University of the West of England.

Useful Bench developed from an attempt by Dunhill and O’Brien to collaborate on small clay sculptures. They constructed a long bench that allowed a clay form to travel between them via a pulley, each artist given twenty minutes to work before it was conveyed to the other end.
 
Faced with a form already partly modelled by the other, each repeatedly altered and defaced it until it felt recognisably their own again. Unsurprisingly, they were also unable to agree on when the sculpture was finished, each preferring their own most recent version.
 
Useful Bench became a souvenir of this process. At timed intervals, a plasticine lump travels almost imperceptibly slowly along the shelf, taking twenty minutes to reach the opposite end. As it moves, its shadow passes between the two artists, becoming almost as present as the lump itself, while a miniature billboard carries a projected image of them at work.

This work was one element in Dunhill and O’Brien’s project Holes & Other Undertakings supported by Nottingham Trent University.

During a residency at the British School at Rome, Dunhill and O’Brien became fascinated by the slow, stately movement of the electric gates behind the studios — a pace that seemed noticeably at odds with almost everything else in Rome.
 
Rome’s foreign academies and institutes each function as cultural outposts, established to support the study of the city while also representing their own national culture. Dunhill and O’Brien began to notice that many of them also possessed rather fine examples of slow-moving electric gates.
 
With varying degrees of success, they sought permission to film them. The American, French and Egyptian Academies declined on security grounds. Those that agreed were filmed opening and closing without any traffic passing through: once from the outside looking in, and once from the inside looking out.
 
As the gates repeatedly opened and closed, the viewer’s position shifted between outsider and insider, audience and participant. There was a certain collector’s enthusiasm to the exercise, but the differences between the institutions — including who was willing to let the gates be filmed at all — inevitably became part of the work.

Convey brings together a number of soft forms based on Dunhill and O’Brien’s lost works, travelling slowly in procession around a motorised conveyor belt.
 
As each loosely stuffed object passes beneath the belt, its structure is temporarily pulled into shape and made legible, only to collapse again as it returns to the top.
 
As with Dunhill and O’Brien’s other motorised works, the movement is deliberately geared down to an almost unnatural slowness. The procession acquires a certain stately elegance and purposefulness, while remaining relentless, awkward and faintly hopeless.

Track was originally made as a temporary installation for the Saxon Tithe Barn in Bradford-on-Avon in 2000. A white form travelled almost imperceptibly slowly along a 15-metre horizontal track, powered by an electric motor. It took twenty minutes to reach the end, paused briefly, then reversed and began the journey again.
 
The form itself was derived from a day’s hole-digging and had something of the appearance of a small mountain or land mass. Its slow, repetitive journey gave it a peculiar combination of purpose and futility.

The important thing about Track that a photograph cannot show, is the slowness of the white form’s progress back and forth along the rails.
 
The slowness is slower than the special halting march made before the cenotaph on Poppy Day. It is slower than Kung Fu walking on a rice paper scroll. It is slower than the shuffling gait of the oldest and most infirm pet dog. It is slower than the plaster original of G.F. Watt’s ‘Physical Energy’ as it is winched out of the shed at the back of the Watts Gallery in Compton once a year.
 
It is so slow that it is almost unbearable to watch.
 
Unlike the unclaimed luggage currently circumnavigating rubber conveyors at airports around the world, there is no hope that this object will ever arrive. 
 

From the catalogue essay of EV+A 2002

This project was funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Board and Southern Arts (Arts Council of England)

Dunhill and O’Brien wanted to put their studio waste to good use.
 
The Leftovers brought together the test pieces, mock-ups, abandoned experiments and unused components that had accumulated over a two-year period. All 567 objects, ranging in size from a few centimetres to two metres, were coated in thick grey ‘tarmac scatter granules’ of the kind used for model railway scenery, then arranged inside a tailor-made cart with glazed panels.
 
The cart was both a display case and a means of moving the disparate objects. Reminiscent of a bier, it gave this collection of redundant and failed objects a slightly mournful, though also somewhat pompous, air.
 
The dusty grey flocking created a peculiar consistency, allowing the many things that had outlived their usefulness to sit alongside one another without distinction. Leftover became an inventory of sculptural dead ends and near misses — a thesaurus of sculptural dysfunction.

Lost Works: Multiples is a series of small resins in which earlier lost works are remade in miniature and placed in imagined ‘idyllic’ settings.
 
At first glance they resemble gift-shop souvenirs or commemorative mementoes. Their function, however, may be closer to that of grave goods: small objects made to accompany something that has disappeared.
 
The series was first shown in Hanover, Germany, alongside a food-related ‘budget range’ sold through an Art Vending Machine.