Each text is published on the occasion of an exhibition

In the room where the exhibition is to be, we discuss ‘sculpture.’ What that might mean, might not. Challenged by the term, I feel myself grasping for terminology, for a definition that encompasses the ever-expanding nature of sculpture. We talk of research-led shows - this show in particular - as test beds, as sites of convening/communing/collecting. Assemblages, mark-makers. Structures of blue-prints, of site-specificity, of site-non-specificity, of coalescing. Of curiosity, of constellations - of people and things- operating across physical matter and thinking. Note object-relations, transcribe a sensibility of sculpture, without having to actually sculpt - do - with bare hands, without acquiring sharp chiselling tools or a 3D printer; without stone quarries or factory-led forms of fabrication to access. Within a home, within reach. Address objects in combination - composition - and iterations. Address gestures, which sit within the language of ‘sculpture,’ mull over on the tongue practice, practise, praxis. 

In the room where sculpture eludes me, we talk of Carlo Scarpa, how he re-imagined spaces with natural light, as demonstrated in the Fondazione Querini Stampalia plan,[1]with corners, steps and thresholds to instil a sense of visual and literal journeying. Sculpture as interacting with surfaces beyond the flatness of walls. The invitation of touch, of working with or against a surface, of a closeness to a material or the ability to move back from, more around, pass by. 

As we search Scarpa’s work, I recognise how my eyes cut plains and planes in the scene before me. How I am sat adjacent to a desk and opposite a window, parallel facing with a door, angled with my body poised outwards to the room, as if my body, its skin - its own textured surface - has shifted to greet the room. Drawing the eye/mind/body over wooden beams, my gaze a spirit level measuring horizontals and verticals, composing the room into an Agnes Martin-esque grid. A room as a sculpture as a minimalist painting. Feeling my weight in the chair as its base gives, which in turn implies the human body, its own joints and axis. The chair as simultaneous elevation and support.[2] Wondering if I qualify as a sculpture. If my presence is sculptural - my voice, my echo, the conversation it partakes in. 

Beyond the glass window, the sun maps localised geography. One materiality upon another material, upon another material culture. Worms as living sub-cultures in soil culture, dissecting their own plains. Mechanised, metabolising more composted earth, forging deeper levels of the ground to hold up. (Question for another day - if worms enable elevation and support of the ground that sits underneath all the world’s objects, are worms the ultimate armature?) The sun flashes light onto the undersides of leaves in the garden, illuminations of green spreading. Sculpture as colour. I learn of Jessica Stockholder, finding her piece My Father’s Backyard (1983)[3], noting her intervention of reds and blues across pre-existing familial structures, an injection of hues that shifted the flatness of a shed’s plane and neighbouring square of grass to become an animated set, transforming stationary textures and tones of existing sites. A pictorial way of looking, (or thinking,) with the physical matter of the body and the materiality of things in space. [4]

In Jessica’s work, the surface of an object purports to let us know something about its mass. 

This something is sometimes accurate, or informative about the nature of the thing we are apprehending, and sometimes the surface tells another story entirely — sometimes the surface generates a kind of fiction. It is this possibility, inherent in materiality, to generate fiction that I am enamoured with. This interest has fuelled my exploration of how paint meets, sticks to, or appears to jump off of, many different kinds of material. The addition of more materials put pressure on the edges of the frame. [5]

Sculpture as pushing beyond a set frame, traversing, growing out. Yesterday, I learn a cluster of flower heads is called an inflorescence, from Old French to blossom, to grow. I consider the cohort of artists coming into the room, like seedlings planted, each one feeling things out. Forming structures, branching out in connection to another being. Base notes and place holders. Fittingly, I discover base notes in a perfume form the foundation on which the entire perfume is built, providing the last impression of the scent. Transportive notes, the continuous pieces that fill a room/hold a room/hold your attention, directing. Vibrations of green in which I feel a strange intimacy. A cross-rhythm between me and these outdoor forms, object-relations at play. I’m wondering if sculpture could be an inflorescence, sweet-scented; if an inflorescence is the physical action of intimacy. What if we framed sculpture as intimacy. A placeholder for connection. 

Start the next day thinking of this intimacy. A tenderness sought in relating research to loved ones, to widening my thinking to theirs. I reach out to friends who have often struggled to self-title their practices as sculptural, perhaps through unease at the historical formality of traditional sculptural discourse. Annie [6] posits sculpture akin to her own contemporary context as space, sending me an article [7] on artist Julie Becker. It refers to her 1996 thesis work, Researchers, Residents, a Place to Rest, reproducing interior spaces at varying scales. Becker deployed small models, elevations, and floor plans throughout her work. They are, by implication, always connected to something larger—human-scale — at least speculatively and potentially.[8] 

Where the exhibition is to be, the room is currently occupied by sofas and a desk. Though empty of the proposed artworks at this moment in time, the room enacts a performance. This room doubles up as a space of both theatre and mundanity, of familiar structures and stimulated intervention. Potential energies - a circuit board channelling human to material presences. Housing - for people, for works, for the two. 

This room has been constructed in such a way that partitions can slide into cavities - taking the living quarters into exhibition mode - and its entrance and departure points move from kitchen walkway to the outdoor garden path. Such malleable collapse of boundaries reveals a pliability to the space which surrounded Julie Becker too, an ability to move from reality to fiction and back, without being detected, to occupy both realms at once. [9] An understanding of the transitory experience of occupying private space is evident in the many rooms of the space, the many-rooms room as liminality and spatial in-between. In-between spaces, not solely domestic, not solely public and commercial, emerging from a city where transience is not just a state of living, but a state of development. The social imagery of late-capitalism. The multi-function of this annex room - the annex as an in-between - floats between possibilities of impermanence and denies any settling point for the audience. Sculpture as indistinguishability. The space where the two ‘rooms’ - gallery and home - connect is separated by an embraced shadow gap cast by the  partitions. Separated by a fine shadowy line - I find myself thinking about delineating space, about borders. I ruminate the act of coppicing and think of my friend Sunny Vowles [10], who shares,

        I engage with hedge-laying, practising this act to then inform an artistic practice. A process of thinking through a father tongue [11] of function, division, and history, to bring it inside, back outside, dissect the structure; physically, materially, theoretically. To offer it up in another form - a sculpture - a personal experience that is their truth, in that it is true to their experience of the act or practice of processing the material of an existing form. A form that, -perhaps quietly-  is steeped in multiplicity, now nurturing, now reinforcing a seemingly fixed form. The multiplicity of form, of interconnectedness. A quote I have been turning in relation to this; 

       “Rhizome is the often-conjured term used philosophically by Deleuze and Guattari as an “image of thought that apprehends multiplicities,” and like the tuber system it moves horizontally rather than vertically. This is close to the pratītyasamutpāda of Buddhist philosophy, which denotes the co-arising and interconnectedness of all existence” - Anne Waldman, Bard Kinetic

With a research practice that focuses on subverting connotations around rigidity in sculpture, Sunny speaks to Form, writing of their approach to sculpture with inherent poeticism. 

        A hare sitting on her enclave on the ground, named a form, a hare’s resting place. The Forms according to travelling water; like the movement of calcite water to create stalactites and stalagmites, or water flooding downhill to a river, to be caught by a bundle of sticks put there, staked in by a coppice worker - a fascine. The fascine serves almost as a filter, allowing water through, but catching sediment; a man-made structure that will enforce embankments from erosion, and perhaps contain a river in its bed. The fascine too serves to treat a symptom of the Capitalocene. In dealing with the excess water brought about by exposing and also covering large areas of land with concrete, tarmac, paving etc. The excess water brought about by the increased carbon in the world's atmosphere which began advancing significantly during the industrial revolution. 

In the landscape the human hand sticks out. I often think of the lonely cairns built in mountains, how even in a field of scree, a cairn stands out as a man-made marker to keep a walker on the route. Hedgerows are interesting because once shoots have sprung and warped the stakes, binding and weaving from view, the structure seems to grow there of its own accord, and the human hand is hidden. So there is this hand thing, and there are details in a form that give information of how the object was made - a protruding mark in a surface that tells you it was once molten plastic, poured into a mould. Is the form loosely bound? Was the maker in a hurry, not rushing to finish, but rushing to continue, an urgency to form, mark, get something down, to relate. Letting everything seep into the next. There are always these connections between objects in space, and there is the existence of boundaries. Boundaries are a barrier, a barrier that exists permanently in reality, or the mind. But we too could imagine crossing that barrier, taking the  shape of another being that may shift through matter easily, as if this structure were not permanent, as if this boundary were a source of food, a route through, a way to inform a practice, a home.  

                                                                                                       I shapeshifted into a fly to cross the hedgerow.

                                                                                                         I am a bird nesting deep in warped branches.

                                                                                                             The lines of civilisation that pen a life in. [12]

 A week later, Isabelle [13] and I continue this questioning - consider Sunny’s proposition of the form being ‘loosely bound’ - as Isabelle expresses a difficulty in describing their work as sculptural, despite it often being categorised as such. Isabelle later shares more, conveying how, despite this friction,

        when considering my ephemeral terminology, particularly that ascribed to sonic art practices, I find a remarkable similarity to the ‘sculptural’. There is an inherent interest in traversing space, resonating with structure and perhaps most importantly, a consideration of form. Form that can hold space, house time, speak to faded memory and encapsulate incandescent loss. In many ways, I view sound as a sculptural form which traverses interior and exterior space. It holds presence, shapes space and exists as a material that can be felt and interacted with, resonating space object and body. When combined, sculpture maps the space which sound navigates, creating a sense of cyclical simultaneity. A unending process in which physical borders are perpetually challenged by permeating sonic form. 

As Salome Voegelin says: ‘simultaneity defies hierarchies and historical privileges, and relationality rejects the actuality of borders and generates entanglements that un-perform organising structures and ideologies through the intertwining of those who they govern for and those who are governed against.’ [14]

I am now envisioning wooden fascines, linear bundles mapping woodland, and lay them in parallel with Isabelle’s sounds, visualising bars of music filling a room. Fascines and soundwaves - sculpture - as traversing a plane, as the view of a plural world - of multi-performances, of mobility, of orientations. 

                                                                                             ***

I once considered talking about sculpture as the coming together of concrete forms in a concrete space. But such discussions, the propositions, the varying entrances to a practice, interest me most, expanding - sculpting - my position. Rather than describe each work, I move towards the spatial, aesthetic, transformative experience and pull that into prose, encounter a riot of slippery poetry, present conversation. The syntax of each work, of the room the artwork is held by, each person positioning something for someone else, bringing a fragment of their own life into being among others. Of potential outcomes, of rearrangements, of not being quite sure. The group show as many fictions. Fiction as a way of not-knowing. Collaboration as collage, elevating juxtaposition and chance over unity of effect… Working not with answers, but inside the space of these questions.[2] Sculpture as opening space as inviting questions.  

                                                                                             ***

Base Notes: an attempt at sculpture, written by Lu Rose Cunningham ahead of the group exhibition Base Notes & Place Holders at EUCA Annex in summer 2024, as part of London Festival of Architecture. The piece, an open-ended enquiry, is led by conversations with EUCA Annex curator TC McCormack and artists Annie Metzger, Sunny Vowles and Isabelle Pead. 

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

[1] Orietta Lanzarini, Carlo Scarpa, The Architectural Review, https://www.architectural-review.com/essays/reputations/carlo-scarpa-1906-1978, (2023). 

[2] Elevation and support, a key phrase to the curatorial research of the group show at EUCA Annex. We discuss the term, considering how sculptural discourse can move beyond arguably problematic devices such as plinths, pedestals and stages, finding alternative modes of presenting and holding space for objects. An attempt to withdraw from classification, noting how alternative supporting structures can function without dominating, but rather enhance a space, with colour and texture, with its own form. Alternating heights, scales and impact. I consider the gestures offered in the space by the removal of traditional presentation modes, surpassing connotations of such devices when considering ‘elevation’ - the problematic associations of monuments, of masculine and modernist devices of power. Of raising objects to a higher level to take on an authority/higher status than everything else in the room. I look to objects such as rugs or steps, how they might hold up a form - an intimate, subtler object-to-object relationship fostered. I consider the gesture of ‘support,’ an adjacent position beyond the overly simplistic, individualist, colonial relations of something raised up, instead looking at more freeing structures such as cradling arms or hammocks, notions of care implanted in modes of making. Offering ‘elevation’ and ‘support’ as terms that contain the other - not binary, but rather both holding weight and positions, with every work able to engage with the physical features of the room but also individually and collectively fill the space with a range of character and positionality. Encapsulating the fundamentals of spatial and structural design/display. Within Base Notes & Place Holders, artists commune who have addressed the challenges of presenting pieces, shifting the boundaries between an artwork and any form of presentation device, questioning the value, uniqueness, power and agency of the work.

[3] Jessica Stockholder, My Father’s Backyard, https://jessicastockholder.info/projects/art/my-fathers-backyard/, (2024). 

[4] Jessica Stockholder, About, https://jessicastockholder.info/about/, (2024).     

[5] Ibid. 

[6] Anna (Annie) Metzger, a Glasgow-based artist working across digital, sculptural, photographic and painterly modes of image-making, often using 3D and moving-image forms and structures as a framework for cycles or sequences of images. Many of the materials used are yielding, being translucent or soft and pliable, including plasticine, textile, nails, glass and Perspex. Metzger is interested in non-verbal written language, coincidences, gloaming and fear. Her work is concerned with source material that has a ‘deviousness or malevolence… sowing seeds that destabilise or defamiliarise known objects.’

[7] East of Borneo, View from the Inside Out; Julie Becker’s Los Angeles, https://eastofborneo.org/articles/view-from-the-inside-out/, (2024). 

[8] Laura Brown, The Intuitive Approach and the Objective Attempt, https://www.x-traonline.org/article/the-intuitive-approach-and-the-objective-attempt, (X-TRA, 2019).   

[9] East of Borneo, View from the Inside Out; Julie Becker’s Los Angeles, https://eastofborneo.org/articles/view-from-the-inside-out/, (2024).  

[10] Sunny Vowles, a friend of mine and interdisciplinary visual artist based in Leeds. Working primarily with sculpture, their practice also comprises text, sound, movement, installation and collaboration, their work deeply considering the passing of agency and the act of listening to produce relations to self, others and environments. 

[11] The phrase given at the 1986 Bryn Mawr College Commencement. First published in Dancing At The Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places, Harper & Row (1989). 

Also find at https://serendipstudio.org/sci_cult/leguin/.  

[12] Words by Sunny Vowles, from an email thread between us, May 2024.

[13] Isabelle Pead, London-based artist and long-term collaborator of mine. Isabelle is an artist working across sculpture, sound, video and performance. Often utilising large scale installation, her work is informed by actions of storytelling and collectivism, exploring the relationship between the voice and the sounding body. Isabelle’s practice extends itself sculpturally in two senses. Firstly, the work presents sound as a sculptural device in itself, having a felt presence in the room, altering audiences’ sonic perceptions, leading how they might navigate a space - how they might place themselves in the centre or a corner, new positions possible - and via the metal speaker stands Isabelle welds in order to hold the sound sources, the stands themselves tall limbs speaking out to the room, sensorial bodies in situ. Isabelle’s work has expanded into an interest in the resonant properties of the voice and the material properties of sound, to create immersive, vocal, listening installations. An example of such work can be viewed here via Isabelle’s website: https://www.isabellepead.com/.  

[14] Salome Voegelin, Singing Philosophy: Deviating Voices and Rhythms without a Time Signature, article for De Gruyter, Open Philosophy (2021). 

[15] Danielle Dutton, Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other, Prototype (2024).
   

Base Notes: an attempt at 'sculpture' accompanies the exhibition: Base Notes & Place Holders

                                                                by Elise Legal

This text is a list expressing distances through time and space. It has been written to echo the series of films presented at EUCA annex. These films were showing how we try to establish some sort of meaningful connection with others, a past, an object, a memory, a narrative… They all embodied a way to deal with someone (or something) that is not right here, not right now. This is precisely how I approached the films and how I composed this text. Indeed, as I live in France I watched the different movies presented in EUCA annex through the screen of my computer. I believe it was another way to experience distance and materiality through films. I couldn’t ignore the time distance between France and England, the internet connexion, the dirtiness of my screen, the mediated sound, the other computer. Still the movies were existing far from the exhibition space. During the online screening, an animal was asking for food, I took it as another meaningful appearance which will be part of the story. The figure of the dog, especially the stray dog, is an element I am used to work with. Its faculty to cross boundaries, to escape from defined and definite spaces, enables me to think about language translation. It also allows me to compose with the gap between two different languages, places, times which sometimes tends to disappear but never completely. 

The dog runs all along this list, coming in and out of the various sections. I wrote from

a variety of memories and dates as a protocol to accompany the show in EUCA annex, which remains far and close from me at the very same time.

17 years ago

‘The light becomes the eye, and as such no longer exists’ is borrowed from Michel Tournier’s novel; Friday of The Other Island (1967). When I was 11, I read Vendredi ou la Vie sauvage, which is the adaption for children of Friday of The Other Island. It was required by our literature teacher. I don’t really remember the story, I read it 17 years ago.

19 years ago

The first color I learnt to translate in English was ‘orange’ from the French ‘orange’. 

I remember it very well.

5 years ago

I spoke more English than French.

2 years ago

I spoke more French than English.

3 years ago

If we were going out for a walk or a run we should sign an official paper called ‘attestation de déplacement dérogatoire’. We could not go further than a kilometre from home and no longer than an hour.

3 years ago

I left London with a bag packed for a few days. I was supposed to do a poetry reading in Paris. The evening I arrived in France, the event was cancelled, all bars and shops in France were suddenly closing down.

3 days later

I watched the speech live of the President of the French Republic on a computer. At some point, Emmanuel Macron said ‘we are at war’ and by the power of words, the French boarders were closed.

1 day after

I mostly spoke face to face with a big black dog for nearly two months.

15 years ago

‘Her red merle Australian shepherd’s quick and lithe tongue has swabbed the tissues of my tonsils, with all their eager immune system receptors. Who knows where my chemical receptors carried her messages or what she took from my cellular system for distinguishing self from other and binding outside to inside? We have had forbidden conversation; we have had oral intercourse; we are bound in telling story on story with nothing but the facts. We are training each other in acts of communication we barely understand.’ 

Donna Haraway, When Species Meet (2008)

6 years ago

Like many of us, I was living in a language that wasn’t my own.

3 years ago

I received the rest of my stuff that was stocked in London for a few months in a suitcase and two boxes.

4 years ago

At that point I didn’t know where to start.

7 years ago

‘I realised that I needed to reactivate the girl who committed herself –ten years, I had signed up and lost in a job that doesn't suit her, to expose this question that rarely appears in literature: how, at the beginning of life, do we all cope with this, the obligation of doing something to live, the moment of choice, and finally, the feeling of being, or not being, where we should be?’

Annie Ernaux, Mémoire de fille (2016)

During the whole redaction of this text

I kept wondering about the conjugation of verbs in English. The simple present, the present continuous, the past, the simple past, the future perfect and so on. They are all time distances.

Now

I wonder if my foreign language is well settled within me.

1 year ago

I returned to England. Since I have been away, there had been a global pandemic, Brexit had been definitively agreed, fires were ravaging forests of Europe and the Queen Elizabeth II was about to die. I arrived on a day when the temperature in the country was rising at record levels. Because of the heatwave, the trains linking Stansted airport to central London were running at reduced speed. Travellers were scrambling to book Uber cabs that cancelled en route, and around me hundreds of people were running to catch the first bus to leave. It was a pretty chaotic come back.

1 year ago

The plane ticket to London from Nantes had cost 13.90 euros. I sincerely doubted the reliability and longevity of an economic and political system where an international journey cost less than a simple car-pool journey.

2 weeks ago

The plane ticket to London from Nantes was still costing 13.90 euros

1 year ago (summer)

The summer of 2022 was one of the hottest recorded in Europe, according to the European climate change service Copernicus. During this period I had nightmares probably every night, probably because of the end-of-the-world smell made of dried tree leaves on the ground, tarmac smelling strong from the heat, plastic that tends to melt. I had nightmares about everything and anything: swimming in a swamp with snake eels under my feet, missing my train, falling down stairs… I hesitated to check the internet for something like ‘why do I have so many nightmares’ or ‘how can I have fewer nightmares’, but I assumed I'd come across some pseudo-analysis remotely linked to Freud and I thought it would be pointless. I didn't want to write down my nightmares when I woke up so that I could remember them better, because I imagine that the point is precisely that I don't remember.

13 years ago

At night, our dog started to bark. The ocean was flooded our house. The north-west coast was hit by a storm called ‘Xynthia’.

28 years ago

In the Abécédaire, Deleuze fundamentally reproaches dogs for barking. He says: ‘To me, barking appears really as the stupidest cry… Barking is really the shame of the animal kingdom’. However he says that he will tolerate a dog howling at the moon, before correcting himself saying that it is ‘completely idiotic because people who really love dogs have a non-human relationship with dogs. What matters is to have an animal relationship with animals.’ I feel that Deleuze cannot stand a human relationship with animals. But what is forgotten here is the idea that dogs too could have a human relationship with humans. This is a possibility explained by the unstable dog nature, its ability to cross out borders, where things circulate, and language with it.

Now

The dune protecting my hometown is constantly and progressively diminishing due to rising ocean

waters.

Now

Some people appear and disappear by the very force of texts.

2 months ago

I travelled from Brussels to Paris in a crowded Flixbus. It took four long hours. The radio was on, the Black Eyed Peas were singing: ‘I had the time of my life, and I never felt this way before’.

4 months ago

A man was sitting next to me on the train. He was watching a movie on his iPad.

The girl in the movie often frowns, we mostly see her from the back. She is wearings high heals. No-one walks like the way she does. She barely opens her mouth. There is a scene where this character meets up two other girls on a city rooftop full of green plants. They are happy to see each other. For the first time, the actress doesn’t frowns from fear of worry. I see her smiling. The man behind me pulls back the curtain.

She goes to the courthouse, she passes through security, she may be a lawyer, I can see her accessing offices. She frowns. On the screen, her body often appears before her face. She has curly and short hair, brown eyes and she is wearing lipstick. A prisoner tries to escape, she tries to arrest him. She falls down and her nose bleeds, her eyebrows are frowned. She goes back to her apartment, there is a guy on the sofa, he may be her boyfriend. They are talking to each other. They seem to have a serious talk, she frowns like she never did before. He takes her face into his hands and leaves. At night she smokes some weed to forget her life that makes her frowns, she receives a message from Sébastien’s wife who is asking if she can call her today, she answers ‘yes’. The day after, she frowns a very last time. The train driver announces that we are arriving, the man next to me stops the movie and puts his iPad mini on his Quechua bag.

5 days ago

I wrote this text wondering if someone was reading over my shoulder, just like when you examine more or less attentively what the person next to you is watching on their phone on the train or the underground.

some days ago

I was just about to finish this text on a train.

some minutes ago

I was just about to finish this text on a Flixbus.

years ago

There are distances within language I cannot stand.

at some point

I’ll have a dog.