‘throw-sculpture’ group1 2020
‘men looking at stones’ 2020
‘woodhenge’ group 2020
‘woodhenge with dolmens’ group 2020
‘polyvinylhenge’ group 2020
Background
Almost as soon as we went into ‘hibernation’ here in the UK, I had the urge to work in wood. It seemed the natural thing to do in the situation! Perhaps it’s not surprising .. whittling wood can be very relaxing, especially if you’ve no firm objectives for the outcomes. I wanted something which could be progressed quite safely while listening to music, or audiobooks, or glancing at the TV, because I needed those distractions .. sometimes I needed to escape far away with them .. but the thought of achieving something constructive while escaping was pretty cool! I also had quite a bit of wood .. pine and ramin lengths, and birch from dismantled IKEA furniture .. which I thought I should get rid of, so it was also the positive thought of making something from nothing.
The ‘throw-sculpture’ group was the first, made from odd leftovers of ramin. This is a tough wood, not so tough for sensible mallet/chisel carving or using power tools, but tough enough when whittling with a scalpel which is what I’d insisted on using. The concept behind this artwork .. and the photo you’re seeing is just as much the ‘artwork’ as the group of wooden forms itself .. is one I’ve experimented with a number of times in different materials. Especially when I was living off my exhibited work for a certain time in Hamburg in the 1990’s I worked on collections of small forms which could be arranged differently each time, or thrown down part-randomly, or played with by the gallery audience. I tried to define them with various titles like ‘Variable Sculpture System’ or ‘Interactive Sculpture Kit’ but I wasn’t comfortable with any of them. At the time I didn’t know of any others who were doing, or had done, a similar thing, and that was probably just as well, because I’m impressionable like a chameleon, and if I’d had more contact with fellow artists I probably wouldn’t have been able to ‘see’ myself so clearly. The photo documents a ‘placed handsful’, meaning the 12 pieces of the group taken up with both hands and placed with not too much deliberation on a specially made mat of Douglas fir, with no alteration to the way they fall. This last condition was the most important part, because I’ve become very tired of ‘deliberate arrangements’. The pieces are shaped so that they will ‘organise’ themselves to a certain extent when dropped, but not quite according to our part-conditioned human aesthetic sense. In other words .. nature decides, to some extent.
‘men looking at stones’ developed as an offshoot from the ‘woodhenge’ work and the subject flowed naturally from that. It just ‘happened’ one day, because I cut the tip off a split end of wood and when placed on its feet it just seemed to say ‘Man’ very clearly! Nothing but filled trousers, if you like! So I made a number of them and this is the first ‘trial-photo composition’ featuring a pile of boulders I’d very painfully whittled from an old, hard and resinous length of pine, or maybe spruce. I’ve made a group of women now too, so there’ll be a series coming.
‘woodhenge’ was a bigger undertaking, or rather just much more of it, of which this test photo is just a fraction. Better photos will have to follow. I really regret not having kept an earlier version entitled ‘foamhenge’ which featured a number of standing ‘sarsens’ and a handful of ‘bluestones’ in untreated blue styrofoam. It just seemed very apt, including the stark ‘juxtapose’ of styrofoam being so fragile, ephemeral, synthetic and negatively ‘modern’. But the sanded, smoothed blue was also so beautiful in its own way. It’s almost gone now, the blue, because of EU regulations .. it was not benign apparently! So ‘woodhenge’ is more sustainable, and my purpose in whittling and smoothing quite a large collection of shapes and sizes, apart from justifying a huge load of television time, was an earlier idea I’d had for naturally-shaped building blocks. A more nature-inclined, less anthropocentric construction toy, so to speak! No, with these you can’t build ambitious towers without them toppling fairly quickly! No, you can’t construct a tight, impervious wall, or a solid triumphal arch! What you can do with them though is appreciate how certain things balance in spite of their differences. What you can see is how even the smallest, most irregular element becomes a crucial part of the whole! There you go!
But you’ve noticed with ‘polyvinylhenge’ that my allegiances are muddled! I’ve been working with foamed PVC for so long, exploring and nurturing all that it’s capable of, that I’ve come to think of it as ‘mine’! It’s a plastic, which should not be considered lightly, but it’s such a wonderful, versatile plastic to work with! This was just a quickly thrown-together photo, and as I’ve said better are meant to follow, but the polyvinyl ‘stones’ are doing more or less what I wanted them to. It may be just visible that I’ve ‘grained’ the surfaces of the blocks by running sandpaper firmly along to give them a wood-like quality but I’m also looking at further subtle ‘pitting’ with blunt tools. The coloured PVC (this one is the grey, which is actually a very attractive one) is limited in thicknesses so for most of these forms I had to bond up to 6 cut-outs together before sanding.
davidneat 