NT Knole House Project‘The Send Off’ – contemporary artists forge new conversations with Wilfred Owen, Carol Ann Duffy and the Great War. July 28th – August 29th 2014 I have been invited to create a piece for an Exhibition at Knole House, National Trust, Sevenoaks. Kent. The exhibition will showcase 18 contemporary artist’s responses to two texts. One is a contemporaneous poem by Wilfrid Owen called ‘The Send Off’, the other a response to it by the Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy called ‘Unseen’. Both poems look at leaving, absence, love, and loss. We are hoping that new work by our artists will offer not just individual responses but also move away from the familiar WW1 ciphers and provide visitors with an engaging and unexpected experience on their journey through the house. My thoughts as my starting point are all revolving round the images and Labyrinth, maze ideas discussed in my Unit 1 blog. The exhibition has the restriction that the work created is to be exhibited on a NT plinth only 30 x 30 and 90 CM’s high. The audience will be predominantly from a non art background and will not be expecting contemporary art in one of the oldest historic houses in England. We had 4 months to research and create our response.
This image shown in The Sunday Times showing the survivors of one of the final battles became my starting point for trying to convey the volume of men, portrayed here as tiny ‘ant like’ beings clinging to the earth but having rooted allegiance and military capabilities. All individuals but appearing as uniformed clones. ‘An Unseen’ resonated with the labyrinths that I had read about and visited. The human mind is an unseen, some times even to the inhabitant of the individual brain and skull. We all live with the constant loop of monologue playing inside our heads. One unseen mind representing the individual within the mass. How to capture this? I investigated casting the inside of a human skull in an attempt to literally get inside some ones head. The cast was a revelation as the tiny veins and arteries supplying the skull sprang back into life. While human, the cast also makes connections to dead leaves and in its three dimensional presentation… a cabbage!
I wanted to sit the cast skull onto an object that had a second strand to my narrative and would reflect the christian beliefs predominant in Britain in 1914. What do I have that was in use by my ancestors during the first world war The Barker family Bible
Combine with filtered dust over the cast ? open at Genesis 111, 19
‘In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground;for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return’
Mock up for plinth, skull cast, dust and Bible, I judged it was far too literal. I wanted this piece to convey both strength and fragility, to be poignant. This piece needs to engage with a contemporary non art audience in an eloquent thought provoking way. 660,000 British soldiers died in WW1 (War Office statistics 1921) Those 660,000 deaths left an impact on parents, siblings, wives, children, peer groups. How do I portray the enormity of this combined number in an approachable yet poetic way. If I draw 660,000 circles on something fragile, or draw lace to reflect the families heartache. Researching lace designs to draw, I remembered my great grandmothers handkerchief somewhere in the loft.
The lace edge is hearts, again too literal?
Reading Stephen Farthing ‘Dirtying the paper delicately’ influenced my decision to eventually select tissue paper as the support and reflected my hopes for this drawing. Farthing acknowledges his title is’John Ruskin’s elegant summary of the activity we call drawing’
I had to decide between white or graphite on white tissue paper.
Having seen the dust on the cast I used graphite powder to accentuate the blood vessels. The dots and circles would be mixed densities of graphite.
At this point I had a tutorial with Mark Farnington and discussed my presentation dilemma of using dots and circles or lace. His masculine perspective resolved the issue ‘Why not both?’
Using a graph to keep the marks aligned. I preferred the lace as rubbing rather than drawing. The hearts were less defined and obscure.
Below : the completed tissue drawing, created over seven consecutive days for six hours a day. The mixed graphite pencils altered the appearance of the tissue paper giving it a reflective starched, rather than matt consistency. The backdrop of Radio four broadcast the daily political events that led to the commencement of WW1 . Contemporaneously the turmoil in Africa, Israel, Ukraine, Russia, Syria and Iraq unfolded, implying similar disastrous political decisions made a third world war distinctly feasible. ‘An Unseen’ Installed at Knole House, The National Trust, Sevenoaks, Kent
My statement for the catalogue ‘An Unseen’ takes its title from and responds to Carol Ann Duffy’s poem, while also reflecting on Wilfred Owens ‘The Send Off’. Joining the lost hundreds of thousands of British soldiers, Owens potential at the tender age of 25 was abruptly curtailed in the trenches during the final week of the war. ‘An Unseen’ represents the lost individual memories, personalities, emotions, dreams and intellects destroyed by the First World War and a Century of time. The artist’s thoughts were of how to make this unseen internal intangible essence of humanity physical.
Each graphite dot or circle denotes 100 British soldiers, each square 1000 creating the total loss of 660,000 men in the drawn graph. (War Office statistics 1921) Media : Plaster bandage cast of a human cranium, graphite and tissue paper in an archive box.
The public responds… Exhibiting within a National Trust property means that the viewers are not the self selected arts crowd, who are normally attracted to view contemporary art. These viewers stumble unexpectedly upon the art. Already trying to absorb the architecture and contents of this beautiful preserved Tudor house, they are then expected to consider contemporary artists responding to yet another historical milestone, the start of World War One 1 but with the added twist of poetry in the mix. Unaware of art etiquette, these viewers felt drawn to physically interact with my piece, my lace rubbings were in their turn rubbed and manually investigated to confirm the nature of the observed fragility. While the drawings were disrupted and smudged, I was thrilled by the general publics observed physical response and their written thoughts in the visitor book. My grids were influenced by Tania Kovat’s ‘One Billion Objects in Space’ but later I read Mathew Baileys essay in ‘Contemporary drawing as idea and process’ about Agnes Martin and several aspects of it resonated: Agnes Martin’s intimate and infinitely subtle works on paper beg close examination of their nuanced perceptual effects. Her fixation on the grid and geometric forms was driven by an interest in creating an elevated aesthetic experience with limited, systematic means. “All great artwork attempts to represent our joy in moments of clarity and vision,” she wrote in a letter to Barbara England attached to the back of Wood I. “Please study your response to art very carefully (and to everything else) as it is the road to self knowledge and truth about life.” For Martin, art was a spiritual endeavour and she was devoted to making viewers conscious of “a wide range of emotional responses that we make that cannot be put into words.”
Agnes Martin ‘Wood 1’ 1963. Watercolour and graphite on paper 15×15 inches
Reading ‘Death, The One and the Art of Theatre’ Howard Barker 2005 ‘Everything you know and strive to know was already known to the dead- or is known to them. Are we diminished by this? p19 ‘Is it not also possible that the distinction made between the ugly and the beautiful death might be a peculiarly vapid one from the point of view of the dying?’ p36 Was the intellectual curiosity and imaginative exchange that I seek from my viewer damaged by my inclusion of a cast of human remains? I hoped the miraculous fragile beauty of the object would nullify the potential disgust that it was gathered from with in the detritus of human remains. (Following tutorial with Tania Kovats) ‘Death communicates nothing. To describe it as mute is to speak only part of it’s mystery. It is not to be found on the surface of the cadaver (however one strains to make meaning from the cadaver, it yields nothing, it resists meaning, or of it owns a vocabulary we do not know it) ….p34 ‘Death is not in the remains…..’ p34 Interests in transience, trace, memory and sculptural drawing. While trying to come up with an individual response to Ritzla papers as part of my collaboration project, I experimented with using Sellotape to lift hopefully just a trace from faces in newspapers. I only planned to select black and white images and was thwarted by my realisation that 99% of newspapers are colour and I had inadvertently created a challenging task.
Finding the result aesthetically pleasing, I decided to re-scale the project and fill a full 50 metre roll. Newspapers became an obsession as I scoured the pages for monochrome imagery, most full papers yielding only 2-3 images of historical photographs or vintage trending adverts. The progress is slow. Experiments were easier using freely available colour imagery, 24 metres was generated over several weeks. Being on a reel and a transparent texture this selected media conjures connections to film.
Issues that arose: The tape sticks to everything and manipulating just the trace of an image selected is a challenging technique. It sticks to itself when the image has been transferred. It collects edges of paper not targeted. Resolution: use a scalpel to remove unintended transfer material. Attempts to stick tape back to back resulted in a solid harsh effect that lost the fluidity. The use of grease and my skin cell residue to seal the tape maintained the softness and caused minimal image disruption, a slight cloudiness. I was reading Cornelia Parker ‘Avoided Object’ and must have subliminally absorbed the quote from Freud. ‘When I was six years old and was given my first lessons by my mother, I was expected to believe that we were all made of earth and must therefore return to earth. This did not suit me and I expressed doubts of the doctrine. My mother thereupon rubbed the palms of her hands together- just as she did in making dumplings, except that there was no dough between them – and showed me the blackish scales of epidermis produced by the friction as a proof that we were made of earth.’ Sigmund Freud So now my epidermis is entwined with the imagery and is also ‘sticking around’ I am aware that Sellotape deteriorates over a prolonged time span, it turns brown and fails to maintain it’s adhesive qualities. At least this has happened to all my photographs but modern changes in manufacture may have resolved this problem?
My disintegrating baby album from 1955. I find the lifted red paper from the album, pencil informative descriptions of time and place, old brown sticky tape and photographic codes a more compelling narrative than the imagery on the front. All the photographs are a tiny 2 x 3 inches.
Flatbed scanned and printed actual size on watercolour paper. My interest in traces and memory are attracted to the potential on using media that has it’s own destructive agenda that will subtly or not so subtly alter the work. To test methodologies of how to display/install ‘sticking around’ I showed the colour version at an exhibition in The Bowerhouse, Maidstone June 2014. On this occasion I hung it as a continuous loop with one end weighted by it’s attachment to the Sellotape. Spot lit from ground level it glowed.
The artist community at the PV were intrigued by this piece. August 2014 I have become rather obsessive about finding black and white newspaper imagery and am now on my second 50 metre roll.The traces left on the newspaper post ‘lifting’ have an enigmatic aesthetic appeal of their own.
This is not fully explained by the bulk of images being a mainly historical narrative with connotations of nostalgia, or vintage trending contemporary adverts. I feel my attraction is rooted in these being the familiar landscape of my own childhood, my early visual experiences and information supplied via monotone photographs and television.
August 5th – 11th ‘Paper-chain Project 2’ See ‘Professional practice- collaboration’ for the full thoughts behind ‘Pandora’s Box’ My thoughts then turned to the box that had been disassembled and rendered in opposition of it’s primary function. What if I had a box that was sealed? Working with newspapers on a daily basis I decided to create a sellotaped box that held unknown to it’s viewer, the remnants of the news stories represented on its exterior. It would be a time capsule of the week that I spent on the project. Pandora’s Box I selected to use extra wide adhesive tape partly to move my experimentation forward and also to engage with many larger scale images in the papers.
The remnants left after the lifting were enclosed inside the box. The week was so overwhelming in the volume of extraordinary world events that I decided to add a brief synopsis of the weeks events from the Sunday Times……. in some ways this detracted from the mystery of the time capsule if it was ever opened.
The week coincided with the commemoration of the start of World War 1. The constant reflections of 100 years of peace in Europe jarred with the actuality of rampant war with Boka haram, Isis, Hamas, Israel and Putin all involved in major war atrocity. Britain had Boris standing for parliament, the potential separation of Scotland with the first television broadcast of Salmon v Darling and the threat of laughing gas as the new substance to abuse. Art this week was represented by Art Angels ‘Spectra’ and ‘Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red’ the 800,000 ceramic poppies installation at the Tower of London. Ebola started to spread across neighbouring African boarders. A minority ethnic group called the Yazidis were being decapitated, crucified and buried alive by Isis who had them trapped on a mountain.
It was an explosive week in world news that I could not have predicted and gives the box an essence of Pandora’s box. The technological speed of communication, has has altered the way we view the world and made it a more unsettling place to exist. The viewers reading of the narrative on the box is distorted; some images that appear to convey sadness and distress are actually miracles of survival. A child presumed lost in the Tsunami ten years ago found thriving; child cancer suffers receiving medals for their courage, images of hope. There are also truly frightening nightmare scenarios of the Ebola virus and Isis. All the evils of man and hope. The box has now been forwarded to the next artist on the chain. I have no knowledge how it will be read or if any artist in the chain will consider the possibility of opening it. |
