Christo: Wrapped Trees: 1997 Proposal drawing
Pencil, fabric, twine, pastel, charcoal, wax crayon, topographical map and fabric sample
My last post on drawing for site specific work focused on the work of Krzysztof Wodiczko, an internationally recognised artist who has a very powerful practice and who has for many years used the city as a background to his work. This type of high-octane work can though feel a bit daunting and when you look at what he achieves, it would have been impossible without the considerable expenditure behind what has been done, both in putting these ideas together and maintaining them once they are live. Not that that should put you off, some artists really enjoy the challenge of raising money and make drawings that can be sold as a fundraising method, think of Christo, but we all have to start somewhere. So I have decided to put a post up about a much more modest venture of my own, especially as I have just installed some ceramics for an installation at Harlow Carr Gardens in Harrogate and the process is still fresh in my mind.
Because most of my work begins in drawing, drawing is an obvious way for me to think about an externally sited project. I have also put work into a public garden before and therefore have a certain amount of experience in terms of what might go wrong and of how to communicate with the important people on site.
Drawing for York City Art Gallery Garden exhibition 'Tree Listening'
The image above was one of the drawings I made for an exhibition in York, these 'illustrational' drawings enabled me to get the idea across to the head gardener, the art gallery staff probably had a pretty good idea of the concept already, as one of them had seen some previous work of mine. However the head gardener wanted to know things like how I would safely attach giant ears to their trees and how the installation would work in relation to people walking through the space.
The map drawing above was made by myself in order to agree with the gardener as to siting of the various pieces.
A visiter engages with a giant ceramic ear
The final installation also included a walking tour led by myself, whereby I told stories about the various plants and histories of parts of the garden. The installation was meant to suggest nature was listening to people just as much as the people were being encouraged to listen to nature. There is still some information about the first incarnation of this installation available on the centre for ceramic art website.
The drawings made in preparation for the Harlow Carr Gardens installation took a lot longer, as the deadline kept shifting because of the continuing impact of corona virus and various associated lockdown measures. Eventually the drawings began to take over as ideas in their own right, but they were very useful in relation to pre-installation publicity.
Various sketchbook drawings of trees with imagined fish/birds
As the idea began to jell in my mind I did what I always do and walked through my local area and drew. This time I was thinking about trees and whether or not an 'invasive species' could land in them. A tall thin sketchbook also helped with selection, and the initial ideas were about putting these 'invasive species' into various trees. From the tiny drawings of species I then constructed larger drawings to clarify what I was thinking of and I then made a few brightly glazed fish/birds, and took one into the local woods to get an idea of how it would work in an actual tree.
Initial ideas for bird/fish/animal/plant objects
One of the first ceramic pieces to be made
Testing in the woods using a bungie to attach the ceramic
As soon as an idea is firmed up as a made thing something else comes into play. The colour intensity was what now fascinated me and the basic problem of how to fit these 'creatures' into a tree, without damaging it. A new series of pen, ink and watercolour drawings were now made looking much more at the expressive potential of brightly coloured 'creatures' in dark trees, with attachments to hold them up. Pen, ink and watercolour drawings
These drawings then led on to another series, thus time using much more intense colour and in pastel. These were very much drawing made in their own right as images in themselves, as I couldn't make ceramics until I had worked out how to get access to a kiln. Now that the project has ended, looking back, it may well be that it is the sequence of about 10 pastel drawings I did over a few days in July are the strongest elements of the project, but that's the value of a process that generates work in a variety of ways, if I had set out to make these drawings in the first place they wouldn't have just 'arrived' in the way they did.
Just after the two dimensional ideas became more important, the early advance publicity for the event was going out, so I was able to make good use of the images.
This was the text that went out as early pre-publicity and it was accompanied by selected 2D images:
Like several of the members of the YSG Garry Barker has been working towards realising a proposal for the RHS Garden at Harlow Carr. The exhibition title, ‘Invasive Species’ was the stimulus for creating a new body of work about things that don’t fit in, in particular the old English phrase; ‘neither fish nor fowl’, became central to ideas about things that didn’t fit in.
The earliest known instance of the use of this phrase is from ‘Rede me and be nott wrothe for I saye no thynge but trothe’, a satire against Cardinal Thomas Wolsey (1474-1530) and the Roman Catholic clergy, written by William Roy and Jerome Barlow.
Who played the parte of Iudas?
The wholy bisshop of Saynct Asse
A poste of Satans iurisdiccion.
Whom they call Doctour standisshe
Wone that is nether flesshe nor fisshe
At all tymes a cōmen lyer.
The phrase began therefore as ‘neither flesh nor fish’ but over the years morphed into ‘neither fish nor fowl’. This suggested a hybrid form, something that at first sight might be one thing but then on closer inspection perhaps another. The first ideas were worked out as drawings and then once an idea began to emerge, trials were made in ceramics, in particular the bright colours you can get with earthenware firings were explored, ones that might suggest from a distance that a foreign invader such as a parrot had landed in the gardens. Gradually it became apparent that these ‘creatures’ were place dependent and that if they appeared in a tree they would seem as if they were birds, if in a stream as fish, or if on the ground perhaps a mammal or even a vegetable. They would of course be none of these things, but the idea was that we often tend to read others as being in the mental place that we stereotype them to be. Such as if it is a brightly coloured creature it must be a foreign bird, or in the case of a recent black Labour MP on entering parliament, she was mistaken for a cleaner.
Glaze tests have been done and now the hybrid creatures are being taken to places where they can be tested as to audience reaction. Some would hopefully go in trees and they have been constructed in such a way that a soft elastic ‘bungie’ fitting can be used around variable tree girths.
I eventually solved the kiln access issue and was able to pay for access to East Street Arts kiln space, a Leeds based organisation that offers both studio space and access to artists' facilities.
I had decided to keep colours bright and almost flag like, especially because the space they were going into was quite dark. If you are wondering where I got the glazes from I use CTM Potters Supplies in Doncaster. A stand of rhododendron trees at Harlow Carr Gardens
The pieces were to go into a stand of rhododendron trees, which were smaller in girth than I had envisaged and so that Harlow Carr knew what they were going to get I created a collage of some 'creatures' in the rhododendron trees.
Photoshop collage of how the idea would look
The work eventually had to be installed. The best thing about that aspect was that the gardeners helped and 'planted' most of the ground embedded pieces themselves, realising immediately that they were meant to be like plants pushing their way out of the earth. I'm always happier if the people who will be onsite all the time 'get it', if so, there is a much higher chance the idea will be communicable. Tying the 'fish/birds' into the trees with elasticated rope was left to me, with help from Terry.
Not perhaps the best outdoor piece I've been involved with, the loss of access to a kiln in the middle of the process meant that there was hardly any trial and error, which meant that several factors hadn't been considered, such as how the work would photograph, which is becoming more and more important in a time of the mobile phone; how possible ways to organise the 'collective' of creatures could have been done, the scale of pieces in relation to the audience distance, and types of and colour of fittings; all of which were I felt issues that had not been resolved properly, no mind the actual forms of the various 'creatures' and the final glazes.
Christo
The images of proposed island surrounds by Christo above are of a massive scale public art project, rather than a small intervention in a garden, but even so, drawing as a central factor in the process of communicating an idea was vital. In Christo's case he used drawings to both communicate his ideas and to raise money to get projects realised by selling them. In this case the drawing is combined with collage, but once again giving the observer a plan view as well as an illustration of what it would be expected to look like. I have a feeling that under the restrictions of lockdown the presentation of proposals for installations will become more and more important, especially for any students that want to develop and maintain a practice that is ambitious and targeted at raising public awareness of issues.
Coda:
Titling work is another interesting aspect of developing work for public exhibitions. You are usually given a very tight brief within which to work. In this case the title had to fit on the RHS designed title cards that were to be installed next to the various installations. ‘Neither fish nor fowl’, followed by 'A series of ceramic creatures, representing the need to accommodate differences and celebrate the contributions of what we sometimes call 'invasive species'; was just about the limit in terms of allowed space for text. Whether or not it managed to convey the idea behind the work is debatable, but a long way from 'Composition number 34', which is the type of title I well remember from my early visits to art galleries.
It was Terry Atkinson that really alerted me to the importance of titles. I was in the same Hayward Annual exhibition 'British Drawing' as him in 1982, (as was Terry Hammill) Atkinson had had three drawings selected. The first, 'The black art of proletarian gob-eating 4: Private Pineapple-Romanoff, Wurtemburg infantryman, Nr. Amiens, July 1918', alerted me to the fact that I had done little work on my own title, simply snatching a line from the poet Yates. However Atkinson's next work had a four part title, beginning 'Non ideological camouflage, ideological sky', then (title part 2) ''Untitled', (title part 3) 'Shape drawing exercise - 'Clearly this artist has not been trained well in the fine art of drawing shapes' and (title part 4) Instruction from a bourgeois liberal spectator', this final forth part of the overall title going on to explain the instruction over 29 lines of text. Now that's a title.
See also:
Some other thoughts on exhibitions I have been in
I have been looking for a drawing stylefrom anime to animation to comics but my problem is my damn hands aren't still.
ReplyDeletevideocubix.com