The Entropic Effect In A Zero Sum Universe: Bruce Davies

There is a limit to growth, but not to the possibility of change.

All of the energy that will ever exist in the universe exists already. We cannot add to or subtract from what is already there, that energy is a constant. In the entropic environment of the universe the most that can happen is that the energy can be transformed between different states. The ‘Emergence’ exhibition looks at the energy that transforms material and gives new form to that which already exists. It is about the hand of the artist in the transformation process, the mind of the artist in the conception of the work and it is about the nature of the material being transformed. ‘Emergence’ is an exhibition that has many angles, the most obvious one being its timing, it has after all been shaped by a year and half of lockdown, but ultimately it is an exhibition about transformation and how we shape the world around us.

Throughout the history of human existence we have evolved and refined our knowledge and skills, harnessing the powers of nature and even developing some kind of understanding of the less easily definable concepts of our universe. As part of this process of scientific discovery there is one highly underestimated concept, essential to our development as a species as well as our technological advancement, that many refuse to acknowledge or attempt to understand; the creative aspect linked to discovery. Art and related creative endeavours have time and time again led us to a deeper understanding of other, at first glance, seemingly unrelated subjects. And yet, we seem to be living in an epoch defined by a lack of interest in creativity, consequently this aspect of life is under resourced, under appreciated and ultimately exploited by those who seek to further devalue it for their own gain.

The current thinking seems to go; if something does not generate the largest revenue from the cheapest input then it is not worth having. To think this way is of course incredibly reductive, leading to our current way of being which sees exploitation as the only state of being. This of course is common to many areas of life not just the arts, but from the devaluation of art we seek to lose so much more than just art itself.

Throughout the years BasementArtsProject have presented exhibitions in which the subject matter of the art is the art itself, in other exhibitions it has been art addressing social issues - local, national and international, and in other exhibitions, the science behind the world in which we live and how we perceive it. Many of these exhibitions overlap in terms of subject matter which says something about the interconnectedness of things. In stating this I immediately realise how this overlaps with our other post-lockdown August exhibition Trade Routes and Trauma Sites (Colonial Migrants and Colonial Residents).

The story of the ‘Emergence’ exhibition begins in the airless vacuum of space, the earth before it was the earth, a spinning ball of molten lava attracting, catching and superheating dust particles, fusing them together and cooling them slowly to become this great ball of rock, travelling at 67,000 mph around the sun, to which our life is anchored. Ancient civilisations lie buried beneath our feet, symbolic of the ever changing nature of our planet; changing environmental circumstances, the plate tectonics that separated the supercontinent of Pangea and created the continents as we now know them. It is this process of change that has taken billions of years to reach the point at which we now find ourselves.

Upon entering the exhibition, the first thing to be encountered is a large piece of unworked Cadeby Limestone. Excavated from a quarry in Doncaster, it is a material that sculptor Keith Ackerman is conversant with when sculpting in stone. Around the garden are a number of pieces of unworked stone such as this one, all awaiting the hand of the artist to transform them into sculpture. This particular, as yet unused, piece of stone has been included in the exhibition as it signals the oldest act of creation in the exhibition. Here, the effects of the universe have spent 26,000,000 years creating the material upon which we now stand, live and work.

This ancient material forms part of a triptych in which human interaction begins the process of refinement from raw material to polished artwork. Of course there is an irony in the idea that we as human beings refine  and polish things to perfect them whilst in the process despoiling the planet to do so. This is a major dichotomy in terms of human existence, in order to learn, grow, produce and survive we must have an impact on our environment. In light of this knowledge the question then arises - how much is too much? During the early stages of the first coronavirus lockdown in March 2020, the impact of human endeavours on the planet became apparent, as if we did not already know. Areas of the world infamous for heavy industry and pollution suddenly saw dramatic decreases in levels of CO2 and other known pollutants involved in the warming our planet. 

It is essential that we make everything count, there can be no waste.

 Although the title of the second work in this opening triptych is ‘Absent Response’ (Cadeby Limestone 2021) many people have commented on the womb like shape scooped out of the rough surface. Here the artist works in response to the nature of the material and the refining hand begins to fashion the stone into something identifiable as an artwork. Once again the earth gives birth to form only this time through the labour of the artist.

Moving across to the third piece of the triptych there are no longer any rough surfaces to be found, the smooth scoop of ‘Absent Response’ has been inverted to become ‘Trefoil (Cadeby Limestone) 2013’ a completely refined object whose name is dictated by the geometric form which it depicts. Trefoil is set atop a series of rough hewn wooden pegs created by Adam Glatherine, embedded in the ground on steel rods. The organisation of the pegs echo the Trefoil aspect of Ackerman’s sculpture and were made in response to his work, not just as a means of presentation but as an extension of the artwork itself. The fact that the pegs themselves have a title, ‘Abundant Geometries (Raw) 2021’, indicate that this is not merely some form of ornate plinth but a serious consideration of the work resting on them. 

A conversation with a friend of the artist reveals something about the way people view artworks. The initial comment ran as thus - ‘I have seen this [Trefoil] for the last eight years sat in the study on a little plinth on Keith’s desk, so how can this [the wooden pegs] become a part of the artwork when it was made nearly a decade after the stone sculpture. It was this question that got me thinking about one of the earliest curatorial decisions, these very individual works forming a coherent grouping. It is true that all of the pieces were conceived of independent of one another, but that is not to say that the process ends at the point at which a single artwork is complete. As with many things, the concept remains and over time ideas change and reformulate allowing new possibilities to emerge.

One overarching concept in the opening triptych was the idea of following the development of an idea from raw material to polished artefact. ‘Absent Response’ is presented on a plinth that is an unembellished sliver of tree trunk, untreated, still covered in bark. By the time you reach ‘Trefoil’ the mode of presentation has started to become more refined, still raw, but approaching the status of artwork as it develops a new identity in relation to its companion piece. It is at this point in the curatorial process that we began to discuss the idea that maybe the tree just beyond the ‘Unworked Cadeby Limestone’ is perhaps the first piece of the exhibition as it is the point at which the material for the ‘Absent Response’ plinth and ‘Abundant Geometries’ begins its journey, as raw material, still growing.

By the time we reach the next piece, the work of Ackerman is now completely absent and ‘Abundant Geometries (Raw)’ has morphed into a highly polished artwork in its own right ‘Abundant Geometries (Zero) which, artist Adam Glatherine, son of a mathematician, informs me is the real point at which you start counting. The metal rods sunk into the ground holding (Raw) in place are now a framework holding the individual units of this work together and raised off the floor; truly the beginning of the journey for this concept as an artwork.

Conceptually this work now references an aspect of its own creation and substance. The surface of each wooden block has been coated with an oil developed by the artist to protect them. The web of blocks are a visual representation of the molecular structure of that oil compound.

Full 23min46sec Audio Work can be accessed here

Moving through the triptych towards ‘Abundant Geometries (Zero)’ the observant will have picked up on the work of audio visual artist and painter Paul Miller. ‘Songs of Wood and Stone’ is a sound art work that takes the idea of creation and transformation even further. Emanating from the bushes on either side of the narrow pathway; the sound of South Leeds traffic merging with the traffic in the street just beyond the garden is part of a sonic landscape depicting the making of these works as well as that of Jacob’s Ladder, another BasementArtsProject commission that Ackerman is engaged with on the other side of the city. Miller spent time at the South Leeds site and in the workshops of Ackerman and Glatherine using binaural recording equipment to capture the sound of the materials being worked upon. The resulting 24 minute artwork is a heavily processed soundscape of ominous drones, metallic whiplashing sounds, whispering winds and the sounds of stone, metal and wood being worked into sculptural form, a process mirrored in the audio manipulations of Miller. Coming out of this part of the exhibition we are left with echoes of a world hidden to most, the sounds of the artists creating the work as well as the visualisation of its molecular geometry. Miller’s work is subtle but patience rewards the listener with a strange immersive ethereal sound world.

The four works by John Barber are a series of three conceptually connected pieces and one that connects to the wider theme of the exhibition. Barber, like Ackerman, came to sculpting late in life having had an interest in geology and a long career with the environment agency. Barber tells the story of being asked by his colleagues what he wanted as a retirement present, to which his answer was a block of marble. Having been unable to source this, probably unusual, request, his colleagues instead gave him the money to source his own. It was at this point that I first encountered Barber during the ‘Event Sculpture’ exhibition at the Henry Moore Institute. It was through one of these events in February 2014 that Barber, along with Ackerman and Dominic Hopkinson were able to purchase a number of blocks of Italian Carrera Marble of the Bianco variety. It is one of these blocks purchased by Barber that has been the raw material for these four pieces by the artist. 

What these pieces exhibit is more than a set of mathematical principles, hewn from stone in the form of four sculptures by an artist, but also the process by which we learn, the skills we acquire to produce the things that we want or need. The first piece is a pure sphere polished to a high degree, hewn from an oblong block of marble, turned into a cylinder, then from the cylindrical shape into a sphere. 

The next piece entitled ‘Torus’ is another mathematical principle in which the donut shape, if split in three and looked at from the end would produce three sections; two of marble and one of negative space in three exact sections. This fact is essential to the name of the piece.

As you move onto the next piece ‘Three: Rings’ the pattern has become more complex, three rings intersecting at ninety degrees, the equal section aspect of torus gone to allow instead for this interesting net of negative spaces appearing within the shape. Once again the technical aspect is forefront in the design, allowing speculation on how you achieve the holes that go right to the centre of the piece. Barber talks in conversation about having to get a chisel with an especially long shaft made to allow him access to the centre without damaging any of the surfaces of the rings.

The final piece in the set is not, strictly speaking, in the same series, although it was produced from the same block. It is the newest of the works and acts as a nice conversational piece with the geometry of Glatherine’s 3d molecular diagram sculpture ‘Abundant Geometry (Zero)’. In ’32 Holy Polygons’ Barber has taken the spherical design and created instead an object with 32 flat faces. Each face is pierced with a single hole, as in ‘Three: Rings’ as each hole is drilled out it intersects internally with another one, until eventually the centre becomes hollowed out forming a latticework of equally intriguing shapes.

When I visited John Barber’s studio during the period in which we were developing this exhibition I stumbled upon a box of pieces collected during the making process of ’32 Holy Polygons’. The box itself is a collection of equally intriguing smaller shapes - the physical offcuts from the negative space of the finished piece - that hint at some of the technical aspects of the design and how it is fashioned. 

Whilst other artistic practices can be considered additive in their nature, such as painting and drawing, stone carving is a trickier proposition for the fact that it is a process of subtraction. Once you start work you are removing material to reach your final destination rather than adding. Whilst one may be able to take large chunks away at the beginning, once you start to get near your final surface, the need to leave as few guidelines and marks as possible becomes imperative. Anything resembling a guide mark needs to be permanent enough to not wear off during making but faint enough to be polished away in the final stage.

The theme of emergence underpinning every work in this exhibition is here underlined once again by the presence of the plinth. Although not integral in the way that Glatherine and Ackerman’s work may be considered, it is still very apparent with Barber’s work too; working backwards from the tree the first plinth is purely a section of felled tree trunk. As the sculptures develop so to do the plinths, the second being a section of tree trunk with the bark removed and a smooth top surface on which the object sits. With the third plinth not only has the bark been removed but also the whole thing has been polished smooth on every surface, although not enough to remove evidence of where branches were once attached. The final plinth containing ’32 Holy Polygons’ has become a wooden cube, completely at ease with the object sitting on top and creating a visual link to the nearby ‘Abundant Geometry (Zero) by Glatherine.

On the other side of the apple tree, two more of Ackerman’s marble sculptures sit in silent conversation with two of what Glatherine describes as “spatial drawings”. The drawings, constructed 3-dimensionally in black and white PVC rods, act essentially as a line taken off the page and constructed in 3-dimensional space; hanging above the works of Ackerman and echoing the conchoidal forms sculpted in marble.

Ackerman’s forms are based on an Alaskan trip with his son, in which they were able to sit in a kayak and watch as icebergs floated past. More generally the shapes carved out of the marble, one in Carrara the other in Frosterley*, represent the conchoid forms present in many places such as where water has eroded limestone, mountain ranges or in the ridges of Greek columns. An interesting aspect of how these pieces are presented in the open air is the effects of weather on how they appear.

Anyone visiting on a day that it rained or had been raining, got experience of the pieces with water settling in the dips and troughs of the forms, seeming to give a sense of an iceberg as it melts. Another reference to the nature of human existence and the impact of climate on nature, and perhaps even humans on climate. The heaviness of Ackerman’s forms is echoed in Glatherine’s gentle, weightless forms as they sway gently in the wind. 

*Whilst the Frosterley Marble (Scotland) is actually the oldest stone in the exhibition at around 640,000,000 years old, its status as marble is contested as it is only partially metamorphosed. 

As we reach the end of the trail there is one more piece to find, a piece partially obscured by a large Rhododendron bush. The work is by Manchester based artist Pippa Eason and, whilst made without ever having visited the venue until the day of installation, it became at installation time, the most site-specific artwork in the exhibition; even though Glatherine’s ‘Spatial Drawing (White)’ was made in situ next to Ackerman’s work and in direct response to it.

Eason’s work was introduced into the show by BasementArtsProject to continue the timeline through from the Earth as a concept forming in space, beyond the materials and methods of the more traditional aspects of art, and into the realm of contemporary thought processes. Here, the plinth returns in a grand way; it is definitely a plinth in its structure and its construction but now it is also an integrated part of the artwork. Visually it may resemble the type of plinth one may find in a contemporary gallery space, but with enough to suggest that it is more than that. Far too tall to be a plinth and with its surface marked with various patterns and colours, it holds a fairly small lumpen clay form well above head height. The form contains casts of natural forms such as shells, but also mass produced contemporary objects such as lego bricks. Also, the form atop the plinth structure appears to twist upwards in a way that mirrors the tree behind it.

During the planning of the exhibition it was referred to purely as ‘the monolith’, a slightly tongue-in-cheek reference to the end of 2001: a space odyssey. As we (Eason and I) talked about the development of the exhibition and how her work would relate we talked about one of the significant events of lockdown which had been the appearance of strange ‘monoliths’ in different parts of the world.  Was this an artists project, a joke, aliens etcetera . . . Whatever it was, it provided food for thought in the development of the piece. Another aspect of the conversation had emerged in our very first discussion when I invited Eason to join the project; this revolved around my experience of her work previously at BasementArtsProject. For this she had created a piece which she described as ‘the aftermath of an unexplained event’ landfall for some strange glitter shrouded sphere from space. The idea of the unexplainable was prominent in this work as was the nod to a future society, far from the dawn of time and the creation of this rock upon which we live, the point at which the exhibition began. 

During the installation of Pippa Eason’s work I remembered a story from a few years ago when an artist submitted work to the Royal Academy Summer Show; an object on a plinth. Somewhere in the judging process the object and plinth were separated and the two pieces presented separately to the panel. The plinth was selected and the object was rejected. When considering the question raised throughout this exhibition regarding the nature and status of plinths, and how their purpose has become enmeshed with the work itself, Eason’s ‘monolith’ brings the thinking full circle, and shows how much contemporary thought brings as many questions as answers.

The final aspect of this work is its name, which as obscure as it seems, is actually as specific and defining as any other title in the show. The name comes from the fact that during the making process it was just ‘the monolith’ and that Eason’s work is always titled in a very specific way. It seems therefore very appropriate, never having visited the venue until it was installed, to name it in situ. A more specific and relevant name could probably not be found in any other way. ///appear.cave.inches is the name of the 3metre square on which the sculpture is sited in the garden according to website www.what3words.com Take a couple of steps in any direction and the location changes - therefore, would the name change if it where not sited exactly where it is? Here, at the final step of the Emergence trail, half shrouded by Rhododendrons and sheltered by the overhanging tree is the final step in a journey out of lockdown. Heading back towards the reopening of gallery spaces but with the promise of new ways of seeing, through touch and the natural environment.

Bruce Davies | August 2021

All photos Bruce Davies unless otherwise stated

Thank you Keith & Tess Ackerman, John Barber, Pippa Eason, Adam Glatherine and Paul Miller