Locked-down freedoms

Still from ORBIT (out of play) | 1m 20s digital video | 2020

The Covid-19 pandemic marks a period in which many of the activities that had become the core of my practice - collaboration, participation and working with specific sites - became impossible or severely curtailed. The shock of work being halted and cancelled, literally overnight, was immense. But I am one of the lucky ones, with reasonable living space and just enough resources to tide me over.  I've therefore enjoyed some positive aspects to lockdown. This pause in business as usual has provided me with my first extended time out in about six (frankly exhausting) years. After 12 weeks, I feel I have just about caught up with myself.

It took me a couple of weeks to get my bearings. While many arts organisations immediately went into overdrive, recruiting artists to generate digital content and participate in online activities, I was still trying to process the immensity of what we were facing and work out the basic elements of survival for myself and those close to me.

Initially I was glad of the time to wrap up Anyone may come and go Preston Street Union's commission for RAMM. As a group, we then went on the contribute to Adam Garratt's online 'lightboxcolab' project.  I  also worked with Megan Calver to put our future work for the Thelma Hulbert Gallery on ice with a short promo video. She and I later set to work on a long-postponed publication to wrap up LEAN, our project for Od Festival in 2018.

Although the empty weeks that stretched ahead encouraged me to think big, I settled instead for working in short bursts on small projects to allow for the other inevitable tensions, intrusions, worries and responsibilities of  living through a pandemic. I made a couple of unsuccessful applications(what's new?) but have also had a few generous invitations to make new work.

I set about teaching myself editing with Vegas Movie Studio, trying to work with video as a medium in its own right, rather than just a means of documentation. It's early days but I contributed a video work the predecessor to your prayer to Forced Collaboration and made ORBIT (out of play), based on my daily circular lockdown walks, for an informal Zoom project 'Stilled Lives'. This film grew from an image I made for a lockdown show 'together / apart' at That Art Gallery, Bristol.

I've been incredibly appreciative of the opportunity to view online and for free, gallery, film and performance works that would otherwise have required a trip to London (or even further afield). Highlights have been Tacita Dean's Event for a Stage (a rare opportunity to see her work in digital format), Mark Wallinger's Threshold to the Kingdom, Helen Cammock's They Call It Idlewild, John Smith's The Black Tower, Ed Atkins' Old Food, Hofesh Schecter's Clowns, Fabrizio Terranova's Donna Haraway: Story Telling for Earthly Survival, Complicite's The Encounter and Simon Stephens' The Sea Wall.

No doubt we will emerge from lockdown to a changed world, but I feel more ready to face it after this chance to pause and reflect. I hope we can 'build back better' - politically, socially and environmentally. There are interesting times ahead, in which activism may be one of the most important uses of artists' time and effort.

Looking back: LEAN (2018)

This score, devised by myself and Megan Calver was part of LEAN. Made for the Od Arts Festival 2018, LEAN was a series of objects and actions designed to prompt thought and conversation around ideas of rivalry and cooperation. Visit the show of a rival was inspired by a conversation we'd had about objects that get parked or left in gallery spaces. Two of our favourites were an electric organ and a sandwich trolley, but things such as brooms, dustbins, clipboards, clothes, toys and scrawled notes have also appeared in our shows over the years.

Lean (Tools for Rivals) for Od 2018, was a series of everyday leaning objects such as a clothes prop, door wedges, branches and walking sticks that were inserted into displays across the festival. They were identifiable only by subtle markings in fluorescent paint or tape and were used to distract from and disrupt our artistic rivals’ work. Over the following 18 months, we continued to place objects in various south-west galleries and to document them. A forthcoming 12-page publication showcases a few of those actions and invites new ones.

LEAN was originally commissioned by Simon Lee Dicker & Bob Gelsthorpe for The Art of Rivalry, Od Arts Festival 2018. 

Looking back: River Bovey Walk (2008)

The distance travelled by foot, travelled by hand (River Bovey Walk) - detail with pedometer | 2008 - | Pencil on paper

One of the ways I’ve been using the time in lockdown for Covid-19 is to reflect on past work.

Although this is an old work, it relates to my ongoing interest in tracking movement and measuring. It came to mind again when I visited the (currently suspended) Richard Long show at Thelma Hulbert Gallery Here I was reunited with Long’s Silbury Hill (1970-1), which acted as a major inspiration.

I was attempting to tie together, as closely as possible, the experience of a riverside walk and the process of remembering it later in the studio. Rather than re-walking it, I chose a slower method more akin to writing: I am drew a fine, condensed pencil line on paper.

I recreated the walk in sections, drawing a continuous line between two markers 50cm apart. Each section covers approximately 220 metres of the 6.643km walk and took about eight hours to complete. The walk itself, in total, lasted about 90 minutes. Yet the enormous difference in pace and duration belies the similarities between the two events. As I drew, I was constantly reminded of the process of walking. The drawing was repetitive, rhythmic, meditative. It slowed my mind and allowed it to wander. Both events were about my body moving through space. The paper, like the landscape, has a terrain which the pencil has to accommodate – sometimes it slows it progress, sometimes it throws it off the intended path. Small wobbles of the hand disturbed the precise measure and begin to form ripples that recall the flow of water and the strata of rocks.

Sections of this work were shown in 'Torre Abbey Contemporary Open' (2009), 'Drawn In' (2009) and 'River Bovey Walk' (2008).

Looking back: Working with mathematical surfaces (2012- )

The Luminous Envelope #3 (Unravelled octahedron) | 2015 | Digital photograph 59.4 x 84.1 cm

One of the ways I’ve been using the time in lockdown for Covid-19 is to reflect on past work. Although I find advanced mathematics utterly bewildering, I notice there is a common thread in a lot of my digital work that relates to surfaces. I don’t mean surfaces in the usual artistic sense of touch and texture but abstract entities of infinite scale (but no volume) described by points and lines. Mathematicians talk about them using symbols and numbers and, more recently, model and view them using 3D visualisation software.

My first encounter with mathematical surfaces was when I tried to use 3-D printing (laser sintering) to create objects from GPS flight data generated by gliders and birds. It’s relatively easy to plot successive points in space in a computer program and to link them into a screen-based ‘surface’ that you can manipulate in virtual space, but turning those points into a scaled, real-world object with physical volume is a whole other matter.

I encountered a similar issue when in 2015 I was invited to work with a range of 19th century teaching aids held at Oxford University Mathematical Institute. These rendered mathematical formulae as plaster models (ie represented abstract entities as tangible objects you could sit on a shelf). I was particularly fascinated by the claim that such objects were locked away in the 1940s "to protect students from the dangers of intuition". In fact, the constant refrain from Professor Sam Howison, who patiently guided a group of artists through engagement with the collection, was that we were dealing with “surfaces not solids”, even as we held the heavy plaster objects in our hands.

The image above shows one of the photographs I made in response to a model of Fresnel's Wave Surface. The original model represents light waves emanating from a crystal as a solid object. The photographs make use of polarisation to dissolve sculptural objects into zones of colour. (Polarisation, incidentally, is a technique frequently used in the study of crystals.)  It was commissioned by Metron in collaboration with Oxford University Mathematical Institute and shown as part of ‘Illegitimate Objects’ at Oxford University Mathematical Institute (2015).

In this context of things that (imperfectly) co-exist in the infinite abstract and bounded physical realms, I was fascinated to be introduced last year to the myth of Skidbladnir by Anna Heinrich and Leon Palmer. Skidbladnir was the ship of the Norse gods, which was so large that it could hold on board all the gods with all their weapons, arms, and horses, yet could be folded up and put in a pocket like a handkerchief (or possibly, I considered, a memory stick).

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Looking back: Interloper (2014)

Interloper | 2014 | 12-page publication + large-scale print on vinyl banner (175 x 84cm)

One of the ways I’ve been using the time in lockdown for Covid-19 is to reflect on past work. Interloper, made for Oxford Botanic Garden in 2014, was a particular turning point for me. For this project, Senior Curator Alison Foster drew articles from Oxford University’s archive of the Gardeners’ Chronicle, which were then randomly matched with participating artists.

My article, from 1841, was on bud grafting, a process often used by fruit growers to propagate different varieties and species on others. Although the processes by which the mixed plant materials co-exist are now largely understood, the phenomenon used to provoke both curiosity and anxiety. The way grafting challenges the boundaries of living things led me to Timothy Morton’s The Ecological Thought (2010).

In seeking antique images of grafting, I stumbled across a beautiful 1660 tome called The History of the Propagation & Improvement of Vegetables by the Concurrence of Art and Nature by Robert Sharrock. Sharrock carried out many practical trials into grafting and, in a neat twist, it turned out many of them had taken place in Oxford Physick Garden, the site on which I was now working.

Interloper examines the perceived divide between natural and cultural, traditional and technological through images of strange conjunctions. (The title itself is a hybrid word, bringing together Latin and Middle Dutch.)

My work, which was placed in the garden’s orangery alongside grafted fruit trees, consisted of an image on a large vinyl banner (a material chosen to withstand the garden’s watering regime), and was accompanied by an artist publication. In making the publication, the usual process of imposition, which rearranges spreads for printing and binding, was bypassed. Instead the reader has to disassemble the pages (mentally or literally) in order to obtain complete images.

Commissioned by Metron for 'the breaking of tulips' at Oxford Botanic Garden, the publication also appeared at 'Counter 2014', Plymouth Arts Centre with MCMXCII Projects, and as part of 'The Floating Library 2015', Silver Lake, St Anthony, Minnesota.

Photo: Kevin Burrell

Looking back: The archivists walk... (2018)

breaking the fall | 2018 | Cropped still from 3-minute digital video

One of the ways I’ve been using the time in lockdown for Covid-19 is to reflect on past work. breaking the fall and The archivists walk over the beautiful debris of our broken flowers are two related works with a tangled collaborative history.

The three-minute video, breaking the fall was made with Megan Calver as a postscript to her wider research project with Sarah Bennett and Philippa Lawrence: Disclosures & Dialogues. This considered possible futures for Hestercombe House in Somerset in discussion with artists, writers, curators, historians, architects, archivists and horticulturists.  In relation to ideas of conservation, Megan invited participants (including me) to experience what it felt like to let things go by dropping flowers down an 8.5-metre stairwell at the property. 

She and I later recreated this action to document it for the Hestercombe archive, adding an extra action Megan wanted to explore of trying to catch the blooms. We also filmed ourselves measuring the drop, which we included in the finished film as it added a further thought about how we might best attend to and care for our heritage.

The text work is my personal contribution to the Hestercombe archive and a coda to our actions. The stairwell we used was by the entrance to the archive office. In coming and going during the day of filming, one of the archivists had to pick his way across the flowers we’d left lying. I liked the idea that archivists might try to step carefully around, but might also inadvertently trample on, what history leaves behind.

The archivists walk… | 2018 | Digitally printed text, Epson ink on Tetenal paper