Drawing : The evolution of an idea

I have a piece of work in an exhibition in Halifax at the moment. The exhibition, Temporal Terrains: an exhibition on wheels - is a Yorkshire Sculptors Group exhibition at Dean Clough and it lasts from 7 Sept to 6 Oct 2019 and like (im)Material Disarray is another fringe exhibition linked to the Yorkshire Sculpture International 2019 festival. The piece is a complex one and I thought it might be interesting to look at how it evolved because I rarely show anyone the scrappy little drawings I do to work my way around a problem, but in many ways without them an idea would never get to fruition.

This is the piece I have in the exhibition.

‘How to move a plant in flower’ Garry Barker: A sculpture in three parts: 2019

Ceramic with metal, textile and wooden additions.

This was the short text written for the exhibition:

Plants are supposed to be fixed to the soil, but in a post-truth age where nothing is as it was or as it ought to be, the distinction between plants and animals begins to break down. Therefore plants will move and as they do they will take on the characteristics of animals. A selection of a small group of hybrid creatures that totter on the brink of self-discovery, as they ask themselves, “are we animal, vegetable or mineral?”

I belong to the Yorkshire Sculpture Group and they often set particular challenges to group members; challenges designed to ensure we don't get too complacent in our approaches to art making. I enjoy these responses but don't engage with all of them because I also need to keep focused on the issues I'm mainly concerned with, but this particular challenge did intrigue me.

In particular I had been reading and thinking a lot about how as humans we have privileged ourselves in such a way that other things were ignored or simply seen as resources for humans to use. I had therefore set myself a task to try and make work that in different ways gave agency to non-human things. Such as allowing materials to work in dialogue with myself and trying not to force them to do my bidding, or to use recycling more (as in the (im)Material Disarray work), or to open my conversations out to include non-humans and to try and act as if my role as an artist was more like a conduit between things, or someone that revealed the interconnectedness between everything. Because sculptures had to be on wheels for this exhibition I thought this an ideal opportunity to test out some ideas related to the removing of distinctions between animal, vegetable and mineral categorisations.

These are some studio shots taken when the sculpture was nearing completion.

Flower heads develop animal tongues

A fleshy ceramic (mineral) flower emerges from a wooden branch

There is nearly always some book research that bears fruition in terms of ideas development and in this case it was an image I came across in a Medieval book of herbal remedies. The way the roots were drawn looked to me as if they were turning into bear's claws and it reinforced the concept of plants and animals being both things that moved. It is just that they have different time frames.

Nightshade from a Medieval book of herbal remedies

I had already been making ceramic plants for an exhibition in Patching in Nottingham and had devised a system of stems made from ceramic exteriors with steel rod centres. I had made lots of these as test pieces so I could continue to play with them and see if there were other possibilities.

This was where drawing came back in.

Ideas for bases

The 'flower' sculptures for Patching had rods that went straight down into the ground, a solution that would be impractical for what I needed, so I began to think about other forms and how these could perhaps sit on a flat base and be screwed into place.

Ideas for 'bone stems'

As I was thinking about the way stems fitted bases I realised that if a plant was to become an animal its stems would have to be more like bones, so I began to look at the green stems becoming white.

First animal head ideas

The stems needed flowers and the first ideas were simple animal head flowers, which as you can see were far too uninventive and a poor fit.

As always when stuck for an idea I tend to return to objective drawing and feed my ideas with what nature invents.

Plant heads drawn from life

There is something already animal like in plant heads (the fact we call them flower-heads indicates the connection).

Bird flower

The bird head idea was then morphed with the flower drawing, it was better but still not right.

I then returned to thinking about bases again.

Rabbit base

Ungainly and too much like rabbit, but it was a germ of an idea. I liked the feet if nothing else.

A badly remembered Renaissance idea

The next drawing tried to morph several ideas of animal forms together and was based on something I had seen before.

Simplified version of above

Ceramic version of the drawing above, mounted on a wooden base with wheels attached.

In a simplified form it worked much better, but was now a bit boring, so I persisted.

Slug base

The slug base

It seemed to me that the slug was a creature between animal and plant forms, (remember I'm an artist and can just decide on any form an invented life might take) I now had several ideas I could take into making and so I made about six or seven variations of these bases and began to test them out in the studio. But I soon came up with a problem and this was how to get everything moveable.

Idea for a cabinet in wheels

The first idea was to deconstruct an old piece of furniture and put all of my ceramic ideas into it, cutting holes for the plants to grow through. I went so far as to make the cabinet by reconfiguring a piece of furniture I took from my bedroom, but it just didn't work. However one of the heads I had come up with interested me and you can see its form in the final piece. I decided to use the idea of cutting holes through things in another exhibition, yet to be realised but coming up in October.

I had been out walking and brought home with me some branches from a tree that had been recently cut down. There was something about the way the branching worked that gave me a clue how to embed the interconnection into the base construction.

Thoughts about branches on wheels

I began to see in my head an idea of wheels being attached to the branches and then I could perhaps put rods into them to 'grow' the stems directly upwards as if they were simply further 'growths'.

But this was far too unstable, and I added an extra branch.

My attention begins to return to bases that can then be attached to wood

Final idea of wooden bases with wheels attached, screwed into the branches.

Eventually with lots of trial and error I made wooden bases for the ceramic bases and then attached the wheels directly to these, rather than to the branches.

However it was this sketchbook drawing below of a related idea that really helped the concept come to fruition. A ghost of a human confronts a bird and a plant, in a scene that could be from anywhere.

Animal and vegetable actors playing out a scene

I have missed out lots of other drawings of plants with tongues and other bases but hopefully you get the idea of how I use drawing to think through an idea. The textile hanging from the head of the 'Jar Jar Binks' type creature was printed by Spoonflower a company I have used for a lot of my textile designs.

Design for headscarf

I had made several drawings of men attempting to climb ladders and these were based on ideas coming from reading about Raymond Lull and the ladders of his art. In these minerals are on the bottom rung and God at the top. Humans are above plants and animals, but not quite at the level of angels. My idea was to have a human endlessly trying to climb upwards but getting nowhere. We are at a quantum scale at the same level as minerals, animals and plants and that is something to be celebrated rather than dismissed. The work was about the interconnectedness of everything and so was meant to appear complex.

So what looks like a pretty confusing mess of a sculpture, (well it does when you photograph it), does have quite a lot of thinking behind it. This is perhaps my greatest problem, I don't think through the lens. This is because I'm someone trained to draw rather than work from photographs and also I forget to try the ideas out as potential photographic images. I still spend a lot of time walking around my sculptures as we were told to do as students. As I do so I try to look for those awkward areas which just don't seem to allow the eye to move on and connect with something else. I strongly believe that the best sculptures make you want to walk around them.

References

Nightshade from a Medieval book of herbal remedies is from Plant Series, No. 1. Manuscript MS408. Portfolio 2 by Gerard E. Cheshire

The 'Jar Jar Binks' Star Wars character first appeared in Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace. I wasn't thinking of it, but once the head was made lots of people began remarking on how similar the creature with the textile hanging from its head was to the Star Wars character. I quite liked this, it seemed to connect me to all those other artists that have tried to invent creatures by mixing various animal and plant forms.

First version of the 'Binks' head

All those early years of reading comic books has something to do with how my imagination works too. The character 'Metamorpho' able to take on the characteristics of any mineral element being a particularly memorable well of ideas.