EXHIBITION: SUMMER OF SCULPTURE (Pier Arts Centre, Stromness, Orkney, until 21 August 2010)
STONE Project and Milestone Carve: work by Atsuo Okamoto (left) and Susanne Specht (right), with the Pier's permanently sited work by Barbara Hepworth in background.
EXHIBITION: SUMMER OF SCULPTURE (Pier Arts Centre, Stromness, Orkney, until 21 August 2010)
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29 June 2010
MORAG MACINNES embarks on a fascinating journey around the Pier summer show THIS IS two exhibitions in one. There’s one featuring international folk, and one room full of work from two local makers.
STONE project (capitals, for some, possibly acronymic reason) and Milestone Carve consists of sculptures, photos, films and objects detailing a three year research programme by Edinburgh College of Art, which was trying to document stone working throughout the world and preserve for posterity some of the skills involved.
The Milestone Carve bit is the fruits of a ‘live carving event’ – clearly not as bloody as it sounds – at the College in 2009. The booklet (preserve me from booklets talking about the intention behind large communal time-sensitive carving events, unless they involve detailed cookery tips) tells us that “as each practitioner is immersed in the process as if for the first time they repeat innovations through subtle observations, haptic processes and subjective modes of thinking.”
So that’s what to look out for. It’s a relief to know that “research gathering processes have evolved by peripatetic means” since otherwise they’d have been stuck in Lauriston Place all the time gazing at haptic tram sculpture. However – onwards!
Admirable to put the best work in the front office, amongst the pretty, vastly expensive trinkets which galleries all over Britain sell now. Gerald Maas is witty. He ’s from Barcelona, which explains it. Anybody who can subvert Florentine sculptural traditions whilst betraying casual mastery of Carrara marble is my man.
‘Glasses for Imprudent Sculpture Observers’ – with opaque fig leaves for lenses – is deliciously tongue in cheek. It reminds me of my student days, when we squatted in a hovel in Saxe Coburg Street (probably belongs to a millionaire now) with a big print of Michaelangelo’s David above the gas fire where we toasted our slices of loaf on a toasting fork (honestly). When visitors came in, they all said, ‘what big hands he’s got.’
The farmer in me marvels at Maas’ expertise – that’s certainly a beautiful sheep, and I examine the ear length and the state of hoof rot. ‘Practices of Neoplatonic Sheep Shearing’ is much more eloquent about why sculpture? than any written treatise. The sturdy form, carved in Portland limestone, emerges from dense wool, quivering with different texture, nervous and alive.
A literal minded shearer might question this technique – in real life you start from the head and work down the whole body, leaving cut marks sometimes – but Maas is making his own subtle point about appearance and reality. This animal stands square, half in the woolly world, its essentials lost to our gaze – and half exposed and naked. Great.
Outside, the venerable Barbara Hepworth, battered by Orkney weather, presides over the newbies – Swiss Sibylle Pasche’s ‘Genesis’, of Kilkenny limestone (the provenance of the stone has its own poetry) is that sort of squatting amorphous lump you can imagine. Susanne Specht’s ‘Insight’ is made of a basalt glacial erratic boulder, which is pleasing – and indeed, does have interiors, and subtleties to it.
It’s a hot day, and the lab tied up next to it is sniffing the chips from the café next door. I wonder how ‘Insight’ would look rained upon and possibly peed upon. I like that idea. Big bits of stone should be out in the world taking erratic knocks. I also wonder, briefly, why the titles are all so… philosophical. I’m betting ‘Co-op 99 tea bag in saucer’ won’t feature anywhere, unless there’s more Maas.
Now, Atsuo Okamoto is interesting – concerned with ‘the natural integrity of stone’; ‘splitting … is a form of drawing onto mass.’ I like his ‘Forest Planet’ – two mischevious pieces squatting on the flags, one a bit like a hedgehog, the other like a currant bun. You can’t look at these in a po-faced way – they’re tubby and friendly and hopeful (and basalt erratic again – hooray.)
Unlike Jake Harvey’s ‘Equilibrium of Opposites’, on the point of the pier, which leaves me cold – a bleak assembly of Kubrick-like monoliths, like concrete stanchions somebody forgot to shift.
Inside and we hit some selected fruits of the three years’ research. Hands feature large, of course – black ones, white ones, lime-ingrained ones. An Indian woman’s hand which can lift a 15 kilo sledge hammer. ‘Imagining the hand as a gate,’ we’re told, ‘is not so far fetched.’ Lunar landscapes abound. We see modern practitioners, with their power tools. The tools themselves are displayed too.
I think back, as perhaps I’m meant to, to the medievals. How painstaking, that process, how anonymous and dedicated. Then the renaissance – how rich, those Medicis, with their patronage – how the sculptor’s position in the world changed. Inevitable to consider the workers who made the art possible – the most poignant artefact is Dian Beizi’s protective back mat, from China, made of fur, shredded fibre and hide, a rich mahogany colour, sweat stained, touch as old boots and sweat soaked. Somebody humped all those stones.
I’m less drawn to the film from Peenya Quarry in India, where a lady in her best sari is breaking stones all by herself on a very hot day. I worry about her sandalled feet and think the whole thing is too staged. Why’s she alone? The one good thing about stone breaking, I’d imagine, is the company of other stone breakers, to grumble about the overseer with. The dignity of labour is all very well, but who is paying the workers? Why’s he not in the film?
Perhaps the sample is too small. Perhaps a celebration of the art of stone carving isn’t, by its nature, political. Or perhaps there’s an element of the process which has been missed, in the search for what the Project Coordinator Joel Fisher calls ‘the possibility of a future object.’
It’s not just the politics of stone carving which intrigues. There’s now a process called the ‘digital stone process’ or ‘robotic carving,’ described as ‘glacially slow but precise.’ You can see a basalt phone, carved for an exhibition of iconic objects, which looks just like – well, a phone from Double Indemnity – produced by this method. It leaves me cold. We need blood sweat and tears, don’t we? We need our myths – Michelangelo getting plaster in his eyes doing that Sistine ceiling?
I guess a sculptor, fighting daily with stone, might disagree.
You’ll find your own favourites – I liked Hayashi’s layers of warm sandstone, mellow and tactile with erupting bubbles – for folk who can’t walk Birsay beach, it’s essential as a reminder of aeons of shifting tectonics. Dappled shapes, folds, stone moving, tattered, split, stained – it’s all here.
Upstairs, on a more domestic, Orcadian/Shetlandic scale, is the work of John Cumming and Frances Pelly. If you want tranquillity, sensitivity and order from chaos, this is your room. There should be a Japanese sand garden, and we should all leave our shoes at the door.
Cumming is a Shetlander, a writer, brought up amongst the tackle and gear of the fishing crofter. His love of language and symbol spills over into his work – ropes twist into Man Roots, Trees of Life, neverending knots. But he’s never precious. A series of Skimmers takes you to the beach – summers scrabbling for good flat stones to skeet over a glassy sea.
Two ‘Vaddels’ (seapools which fill and empty with the tide) are a hymn to game geometry – random stone counters scatter round a board which, as you study it, becomes a pool, then a game of chequers, then a pool again. You have to see them to understand; they’re mute and elegant about motion and stillness. If you pine for vaddels, or miss a restless tide, you’ll want one.
He takes fuchsia, that Orkney weed-shrub, and makes elegant dhans (floats – or pouches) with it. The snakeskin colour of the wood, delicate as fiddlepegs, contrasts with the charcoal ceramic pods – they look light as seed pods, but they’re ceramic. Textures abound – plinths are as vital as stones. Random rust stains and speckles assume all sorts of importances.
Pelly too plays with wood – ‘8 Sceptre’ typically debunks pomp and circumstance. The Quaker simplicity of the mixed wood and bone arrangement look like dowelling sticks, or antler horns. She honours the majesty of the simple, in her work ‘Still Life Tryptich’ in ceramic, lead and graphite, plays with a fruit bowl – apples, bananas, shadows move in and our of the work in an elegant shape dance.
‘The Fields About Me’ – ceramic and paper – feel intimate, a personal investigation of interior, as well as exterior landscape. Here are scribbled words – Orkney fields carry the scars of ploughing sowing and reaping of course, but we’re also being told about Pelly’s own ideas about language. Like Cumming, words energise her. She carves haiku in dialect, love tokens, Shaker exhortations about the value of the simple.
I came away – and you should – feeling cleansed and buoyed up by this room. The STONE project and Milestone Carve booklet remarked that ‘much of what artists are exploring is beyond the periphery of language.’ The dozen or so exhibits from each of these makers bridges that gap as eloquently as any research project.
It’s a fascinating journey, this Pier Summer offering – and it was packed with Festival musicky folk soaking up the eloquent silence of shape.
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