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Talk

Extracts from a talk given by Anna Gillespie in June 2013for Bath Society of Artists.

“I once heard another artist say that the way in which they made work was like a ‘drunk negotiating furniture’.  This may not sound very professional but it does rather express something I want to convey in this talk, and that is that the work I make does not emerge ‘in a straight line’, let alone one that is mapped in advance according to some rational plan.  If anything it is more a question of  things looming up and hitting one in the face.  It is more of a dream-like process, and as I have been working for 20 years now this is a dream that extends for 20 years and has roots that reach back into the deeper past too. 

Much of my work is about the body, the emotions embedded in it, and about the fundamental human reality of being embodied.   I am aware of the current pressure on artists to be able to intellectualise about their work – to produce ‘statements’.  And there is an irony in that despite choosing not to do this very often, in agreeing to give this talk I am going to try and verbalise about work that I believe to be fundamentally non-verbal.   That is not to say that my work doesn’t have concepts or ideas inhabiting it.  It is just that these ideas and thoughts do not lead the process, in my experience they follow it – often at some distance.

To say that the work is led either by ideas, feelings, intuition, political intention, materials, expediency or serendipitous events is to pin it down too much.  There is a constant flow between these forces which I am only too happy to allow.  I feel it is important to trust this process, to have faith that it will form itself into a path with meaning, even if one can only see some of the strands that compose it when looking at it retrospectively.

I want to honour the unconscious aspects of the work and emphasise, even defend, this aspect of the work in particular because it goes against the current tide of art-making in this country.

One of the crucial things about letting the unconscious have its say is that, being a sculptor of the human body, breathing ‘life’ into inert materials is at the heart of my work.   I take inert materials, whether it be clay, masking tape, acorns or plaster, and I make something that for a moment people might believe is sentient, has feelings.  Whilst actually what is happening is that our own feelings can be projected into an object, just for a minute the reality is different and a magic transformation happens.  The object, the figure, contains life.  In my experience this alchemy is not an intellectual feat, but one that is generated from an entirely different place.

An example of this might be the sculpture of a small child’s head called Cracked which I made many years ago now.  To my annoyance I found I couldn’t get it off the armature once I had modelled it, so I had to give up on it and hit it with a lump hammer to get it off its stand.  The cracks that formed, which I then rubbed graphite into, turned out to be the making of the piece.  This is just a tiny example of the way making art for me is not always purposeful; you have to catch things as they are thrown at you.

Anna Gillespie contemporary British Sculpture Cracked Head
Cracked

In 2001, barely one month after I gave birth to my second son , 9/11 happened.  Before that date I had been working in stone and had had figuration knocked out of me by my MA.  But as I watched events unfold on the TV, as so many other people around the world were also doing, one particular image that struck me was of all the faces of all those New Yorkers looking up.  And of course New Yorkers are of every sort of race and to me it felt like the world looking.  That the human emotions generated, in all their diversity, were shared universally.  It was the moment when I realised that I could be figurative again – that figuration wasn’t superficial or passé or whatever else my tutors had condemned it as being.  A big change though, which came at the same instant as the first realisation, was that whereas previously my work had been closer to self-portraiture, in the broadest sense, my work could now look beyond myself and connect with humanity and with the archetypal.

By this point though, with children in tow and a studio within the house, it was clear that stone carving was no longer practical, and in any case I had already come up against what I saw as its creative limitations.  So I consciously looked for a lightweight, clean medium in which to build work that I would be able to move around the studio unaided.  Through a rather circuitous route, I discovered masking tape.  I’ve often thought of it to myself as a ‘feminist’ sculpting material – you can model with it on the proverbial kitchen table and your hands are still clean – ready to change a nappy, answer the phone or even cook at a moments notice!

Anna Gillespie Contemporary Sculpture Flying Boy
Flying Boy

 

After a year or so of working with the tape I had a one-person show at Centre Space in Bristol.  At this point the masking tape was very raw, unsealed with resin as it would be later.  But one man fell in love with a sculpture of a crouching boy and took the risk of asking me to cast it into bronze.  The foundry I found, Castle Fine Arts, also accepted the risk of trying to cast masking tape into bronze and eventually we achieved a satisfactory cast which was the start of my relationship with bronze.

 

It felt to me, in the years immediately after 9/11, that every time I turned the news on it was about places such as Afghanistan with many images of people lined up, kneeling, captive with their hands tied behind their backs.  Without analysing it these images must have sunk in and then came back out again in the studio.  It is only in retrospect that I see that they had a personal aspect, as I came to terms with my new state of motherhood and the restrictions it imposed.  Looking back and seeing this, is another example for me of the way in which work can emerg without the ideas it conveys necessarily even being conscious at the time.   Does it diminish the power?  I think not.  And in any case there are times in life when simply making work is an achievement against the odds.  There is no point beating oneself up if there is not a coherent thesis to accompany it.

At the same time as working with these images of captivity, and again this dichotomy was not apparent at the time, I was also very involved in an image of freedom and weightlessness.  Around this time I learnt a little about near death experiences.  One woman related how during this experience she had seen the classic ‘light at the end of a tunnel’ with a figure standing in it.  She asked the figure what the light was and the figure replied that it was God’s breath.  The woman, who was on the edge of death at that point, realised then that she was, in her own words, ‘standing in God’s breath’ .

Anna Gillespie contemporary sculpture In Gods Breath
In God's Breath

The masking tape seemed to me to be able to create figures that expressed both the lightness I needed for works around the theme of Standing in God’s Breath’ and the for heavy emotional work.  At this time I also made works in Gaffer tape.  One of the particular things I enjoyed about this was the way in way ‘ordinary blokes’ would respond to figures made from such an ordinary, everyday and in some ways ‘masculine’ material.  Before I knew what Arte Povera was, I was in a way, making it.

Anna Gillespie contemporary British sculpture Leaping the Void
Leaping The Void

In 2006 I become aware of, and deeply anxious about, climate change.  And I began to ask myself whether it was legitimate to be making sculpture at this point in the worlds history or whether it was simply an indulgence.  To help myself work through this dilemma I signed onto a course at the Schumacher College in Devon called Art in Place.   Anthony Gormley was teaching on the course, as was Peter Randal-Page and Peter London.  Peter London’s teaching in particular meant the course was effectively life changing for me, as was the whole experience of being at the college itself which is run on Ghandian priniciples.   Having been there for two weeks the answer to my question came back clearly to me as being that sculpture can be of ‘service’.  It can be part of the change.

 

Through working outside in nature and through many conversations a kind of revelation came that as humans we are not separate from nature but very much part of it.   Whilst this has been described by many people, the actual experiencing of it was hugely powerful for me.    Just to give one example, this drawing of a beechnut casing, made at that transformative time, looks sexy because the physical structure of that part of the tree is created on the same principles as we are. 

Anna Gillespie contemporary British Sculpture Beechnut Drawing

Beechnut Drawing

So what emerged from this time, unintentionally again, was two strands of work.  The first is what I would call political work, such as Hanging On, made from a found oil drum lid and unique bronze, which is about humanity hanging on to its dependency oil. 

Anna Gillespie contemporary British sculpture Hanging On

Hanging On

I think at that time I too was just about ‘hanging on’ but that more personal meaning to the sculpture wasn’t conscious at the time.  Icarus, too is about global warming – he was after all warned that he might get too hot if he flew.

Anna Gillespie contemporary British sculpture Icarus
Icarus

This first strand of work often involved using found rusty objects.  Whilst originally political in intention it quickly migrated to become more personal for example my ‘finds’ of rusty lobster pot bottoms took me unwittingly back to themes of captivity.

The second strand of work that emerged from attending the course at Schumacher was inspired by ideas from deep green ecology and experiential understanding of them.  A key idea is that just by appreciating the beauty of the planet, by connecting with nature, one has an impact; as it is our disconnection from nature that is the problem, then reversing that is of service.  The physical act of being asked to make work outside whilst at Schumacher has then reverberated on to me spending many days, weeks and months under trees over the last few years gathering material to make sculptures from.   Bark, acorns cups of all descriptions, beechnut casings, leaves and more recently ivy.

The work has evolved over the years but at its core is an attempt to capture the feeling of being out in nature, of feeling part of it, even if only fleetingly, rather than separate from it.

Each ‘acorn’ sculpture is made from material gathered from a particular tree.  This is technically because different trees give very different coloured and shaped acorns.  Even the same tree can give subtly different acorns on different years.  It also reflects a kind of respect or awe that builds up as I ‘work with’ an individual tree. Part of the joy of collecting for me is that it requires me to slow down, to observe.  I am on the same level as insects, squirrels, sheep, cobwebs.  Each year I discover new trees but I also return to some of my favourites year after year, during the season visiting them about every three days or so to gather whatever has freshly fallen.  The weather determines the patterns of my days in the autumn too.  For a month or so I live much closer to the land.

In the autumn of 2012 there were almost no acorns and beechnuts on the trees due to the unusual weather conditions caused by climate change.  As a result I ran out of enough acorns from specific trees and made my first piece composed of acorns from different trees.  Originally called Prayer for the Trees, this piece is now called For the Trees.  I have also found myself adding in the galls and twigs.  The work slowly changes, imperceptibly.

Anna Gillespie contemporary British sculpture For the Trees

For The Trees

Each acorn cup is exquisite, beautifully engineered.  Each one is exactly the same, and yet no two are identical. Nature just produces so many of them. And actually that is how nature produces us, so many of us. We are all the same and yet each one of us is different.  Although most beechnuts have four petals, you get the occasional one with five or just three petals.  There is a pattern, a norm, and yet erratics are also part of that norm.  Because I gather for hours and hours and hours it becomes kind of like a meditation on our relationship with nature.  It’s a very leveling experience - we are just like acorn cups. There are millions of us and we are all identical and yet all different. We can't pretend that we are above nature.  We are nature.

There is a connection here to the earlier work in masking tape.  What seems to be happening, again unintentionally, is that I am using a material that is normally disguarded, that has no apparent value and finding a beauty in it.   Similarly, the work is built up out of many repetitive acts, of many small repeated parts.

Repetition, whether it be collecting the acorns, sticking them on or tearing up masking tape, is interesting in its own right.  When I am most involved in this kind of work I often get a word going round and round my head, for example the journalists name Rita Shakrabarti.  From talking to people who know about Buddhist meditation, I understand that they see this as a sign that the mind is sinking below the intellectual level.  I also find in the studio that I often listen repeatedly to the same CD, sometimes for as long as a couple of months.  I think it might be that the familiarity fills the space that mind-chatter would normally fill and therefore allows me to get on with the work.

There is also of course the fact that I'm repeatedly making the human form.  I feel, through this work, connected to the all the people who for millennia have done the same, made representations of the human body.  The ceramicist Edmund de Vall has said that Japanese potters repeat forms with the explicit intention of diminishing the ego, and whilst doing something such as sculpting the human body one cannot pretend to ones ego to be doing something ‘new’.  This is one of the attractions of working with bronze foundries for me, in that people have been pouring bronze, molten metal, in a way that has changed little in 3000 years.  In this sense my work is a type of historical repetition too.

Sometimes an idea for a sculpture comes to me in a dream or in a state of waking semi-consciousness.  Rescue Me is an example of this, and when it happens, rather superstitiously, I see this as a gift and feel that should I ignore it by not manifesting it, ie actually sculpting it, such a gift might not be offered to me again.  This is another example of the ‘nonverbal’ origins of my work – an offering such as this comes from the unconscious not the intellect.  I am almost fearful that if I do verbalise about the work, tie it down, I might lose it.

Anna Gillespie contemporary British sculpture Rescue Me
Rescue Me

I am also often given physical gifts.  The acorns for L'Homme de Chene were given to me by my sister who unexpectedly found her tent surrounded by them in France. 

Anna Gillespie contemporary British sculpture L'Homme de Chene
L'Homme de Chene

Another particularly interesting gift was that of a whole small tree given to me by some Christian neighbours.  They had originally wanted to use it as the Tree of Life in a church play and when that idea faded and it was given to me something of their original intention stayed with the tree.  The man and woman in the tree have a tension between them but the piece is also about our human relationship to nature, about how our culture has damaged that relationship and about the subsequent desecration of nature.  But sculpture, for me, is always more of a poem than an essay.  The tree led the way.  I followed.

Anna Gillespie contemporary British sculpture Tree of Life
Tree of Life

Not all of my work though with found objects results in a comment about our relationship with nature.  At one point I even thought that that aspect had slipped away entirely.  But then, like the proverbial drunk, over the course of a few months, I stumbled across some amazing objects on beaches.  The work I made as a result of these finds ended up being exactly about the way in which I had slightly blanked off from my own feelings about climate change.  Tipping Point and Watching It Happen emerged as figures calmly, almost nonchalantly, watching sea levels rise.

Anna Gillespie contemporary British sculpture Tipping Point
Tipping Point

Anna Gillespie contemporary British sculpture Watching it Happen
Watching It Happen

Whilst there are major themes such as these that run through my work, there have also always been pieces which I call ‘erratics’ – pieces that don’t fit neatly into the apparent scheme of things.  During the winter of 2011/12 I made a whole series of work in plaster which were really expressing more ‘domestic’ themes such as motherhood, home-making and the expectations on women to look a certain way.  It is important to let these works come out even if they are not ‘shown’ in any public sense.

Anna Gillespie contemporary British sculpture First Day Back
First Day Back

Anna Gillespie contemporary British sculpture F*** Me Pumps
Fuck Me Pumps

Anna Gillespie contemporary British sculpture On Top Of It All
And On Top Of It All

Anna Gillespie contemporary British sculpture Pick Up Your Own Fucking Shoes
Pick Up Your Own Fucking Shoes

Women artists have often been accused of only really being able to make work about their own lives – self-portraiture of some kind or another.  I do accept that most of my work contains an element of this, although sometimes when it is most present it is hidden through the guise of a male figure.  Running on Empty is not about anorexia, as some people who have seen it in the studio might have thought, but rather about being empty of ideas or inspiration.  Again, this figure arrived fully formed in my head one morning, a gift given in dream form which I then had to honour by making it.

Anna Gillespie contemporary British sculpture Running On Empty
Running On Empty

Sometimes work is just provoked by a simple everyday event.  A recluse on our road finally came to the end of his ability to live independently and during the clear out of his house by its new owner I rummaged through the skip and was invited in to see the conditions in which the old man had lived.  Apparently he had been in a Japanese prisoner of war camp, and then, decades later, he had been living on our street but confined to just one amazingly filthy room.  He had re-made himself a prisoner.  The nails in the skip outside seemed to capture much of this for me and play on the idea of making the bed which each of us lie in. 

Anna Gillespie contemporary British sculpture Embedded
Embedded

This sense of letting the work lead, which I realize is not in the slightest bit unique as an artist but is perhaps less fashionable today than the letting ideas take the lead, was expressed well by Rodin:

 

“Where shall we begin? There is no beginning.  Start where you arrive.  Stop before what entices you. And work! You will enter little by little into the entirety.  Method will be born in proportion to your interest; elements which your attention at first separates in order to analyse them, will unite to compose the whole.  In the calm exile of work, we learn first patience, which in turn teaches energy, and energy gives us eternal youth made of self-collectedness and enthusiasm.  From such a vantage we can see and understand life, this delicious life that we denature by the artifices of our enclosed, unaired spirit, surrounded though we are by masterpieces of nature and of art.  For we no longer understand them, idle despite our agitation, blind in the midst of splendours”

Auguste Rodin.”

 

Anna Gillespie Sept 2013