The Metaphorical Basement: Degrees of Separation by Bruce Davies

Introductions
In May 2023 I was introduced by email to Manchester based artist Jeffrey Knopf. The introduction was made by 2014 BasementArtsProject exhibitor Alistair Woods, who now runs Depot Art Studio in Manchester. Alistair had recommended that Jeff contact me in relation to two ongoing projects. By June we had decided that there was an interesting project emerging, and by July we had installed and opened ‘The Metaphorical Museum And A Return To The Underworld’.

This exhibition took one of the tools of modern archeology, the LiDAR scanner, and used it to analyse contemporary cultural thought in relation to ancient history. The LiDAR scanner measures distance by the time that it takes light to be reflected from an object's surface; from this it then forms a Point Cloud Image. The speed of the lightwaves reflected allows the software to build up a coloured and textured image on top of the underlying structural net, giving us the 3D representation..

Whilst LiDAR is used in archeology to determine topographical features of the land with amazing accuracy and intricate detail, Knopf reverses this strategy instead focussing on the issues that prevent technology from revealing the secrets of the universe to us. ‘The Metaphorical Museum’ instead created as many questions as it answered.

In the months since, both Jeff and I have been considering details such as this and wondering is there another angle to this archeological process  

Collapsing History 
Many visitors to The Metaphorical Museum commented that their descent into The Basement gave them an understanding of how Howard Carter must have felt upon opening the tomb of Tutankhamun. The glint of shiny treasures, obscured by the accrued dust of time, being viewed by human eyes for the first time in thousands of years. 

In the months since ‘The Metaphorical Museum’ our conversations have continued, leading to a couple of trips to Manchester to visit Jeff’s studio and now a collaborative exhibition between myself as BasementArtsProject and Jeff. For ‘The Metaphorical Basement’ I have become the Art-eologist to uncover and re-present the layers of history contained within the walls of the real Basement.

The past will always be with us, living like a ghost alongside us, encouraging us to learn from its successes and its mistakes. November is that time of year when the fragile skein between these realities is at its thinnest, this year for Basement particularly so, as the past threatens to overwhelm the future.

Since 2011 more than one hundred-and-fifty artists have worked at BasementArtsProject. Many have left behind traces of their time spent with us. Rarely are these traces removed, often they become markers of history that incoming artists choose to respond to or work with; informal and often unplanned unintentional collaborations.

As with the Dia de Muertos, ‘The Metaphorical Basement’ exists for only a brief moment in time, as the year darkens towards winter allowing us a glimpse of our history. Now, in a reversal of this process I shall be deconstructing this history, peeling back the onion-like  layers and reconstructing these deteriorating fragments in the white walled studio space at Paradise Works in Manchester. 

The Zen of Learning
The best learning happens when we do not realise that we are learning. That learning is driven by a natural curiosity rather than a forced imperative to compete in this dog-eat-dog world. It is no coincidence that art is considered part of the humanities in educational terms. The University of Al Quaraouiyine was the first University to be created in Fez, Morocco in 859CE and went on to  become ‘one of the leading spiritual and educational centres of the Islamic Golden Age.’

Much of the current government rhetoric around education is based on the idea that higher education’s purpose is for its participants to command higher wages later on in the world of employment. This particular ideology precludes art from being a University subject for the reason that it is traditionally a creative practice that is also a time consuming intellectual endeavour, thereby making it near impossible to command any wage at all.

“The purpose of a university is to be the guardian of reason, inquiry and philosophical openness, preserving pure inquiry from dominant public opinions.”

In the eyes of the government, I am deemed an educational failure having obtained a 1st class degree in Art & Design yet having never commanded that higher salary. Yet, I feel that the time I have spent working with artists and recent graduates unpaid, donating my time and money to run BasementArtsProject, fits the Pearson website’s description. Their strapline is ‘Lifelong Learning with Pearson UK. Supporting and enriching every step of your education’; the lifelong education with BasementArtsProject being mine and hopefully, the artists too. The following quote from a collective of recent graduates gives me hope that I am getting something right, even if it is not commanding me any wage, let alone a higher one. 

“We’re super thankful for the time you gave us. Jonny’s exact words to your message were that he wishes you were one of his lecturers at Uni.”

‘The Metaphorical Basement’ features the work of twenty artists from across the years at BasementArtsProject. With ages ranging from 21 - 61 they represent every group; undergraduate, recent graduate, emergent artist and the established. From those still studying to those with work in collections around the world. More recently we featured the work of a 10 year old boy selling his work for Autism and ADHD charities. The energy of youth mixed with the experience of years is inspiring and a force to be reckoned with when thinking about how we learn.  

Fight For The Future, Do Not Fear It!
‘The Metaphorical Basement’ has become something of a retrospective since Jeff and I first talked about it in June of this year. With recent funding failures and the fact that I no longer have a job with which to support the programme, Basement is on an enforced hiatus until I can find a wage to start again. Happily I do have some new irons in fires and I hope that the hiatus will be a short one. Having survived a pandemic lockdown we will not go quietly. But until then, one last conceptual hurrah and to quote Dylan Thomas; 
‘Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day; 
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.’

Forensic Archeology 
And so, to the artists and the original concept behind this show. The Metaphorical Museum really exists, we just don’t realise it. Just like our memories It exists in a place where time, the 4th dimension, collapses and inhabits the 3 dimensions of physical space. It is a place of invention, innovation, excavation, examination and learning.

Within a couple of months of talking about how we might make use of the studio space, I had drafted a project template based on the title ‘Degrees of Separation’; this extended some of the aspects of Jeff’s practice to other artists working with similar ideas, in both technical and conceptual terms. In the manner of an employer trying to achieve a particular end in business, my first act was to think back over the history of BasementArtsProject as to who might fit this brief. Thus was born the first of the collaborative projects containing new material between two artists, who before this point were unaware of each other's work. 

Having worked as a Police Forensic Artist, Sharon McDonagh’s current practice is not too far removed from a world in which the gaps in reality are filled in by imagination. McDonagh has moved her attention from the world of reconstructing human likeness for the purpose of identification, to the reconstruction of abandoned human habitation through architecture and found objects. Her work is nostalgic yet imbued with a sense of disquiet. Through these assemblages we are able to pick apart the remnants of people’s lives once they have departed and imagine what came before. 

McDonagh’s practice seemed very much aligned with the practice of Jeffrey Knopf and the idea that they may produce a conceptually tight work or works did not seem like a reach too far. After a visit to Jeff’s Studio with Sharon, a series of works began to take shape before we had even left the building.

Firstly an unwitting collaboration embedded in the very fabric of ‘The Basement’s’ environment that had begun with Sharon’s exhibition ‘Resonate’,July 2022, in which she re-created sections of ‘The Basement’ walls and then obscured those sections with the re-creations. These took the form of canvas’ primed with concrete, painted and embedded with fragments taken from the environment, screws, bits of blu-tac etc.

In June 2023 during Jeff’s tenure at BasementArtsProject he also made use of the same feature. This time, instead of working over the feature as Sharon had done, he instead took to the inside of the shape with a piece in cast pewter.

The first piece to emerge from this collaboration has been a melting of one time frame into another. Using 3D scanning technology Jeff has created a light relief sculpture of the negative space in the wall with his object embedded at the centre of it, but now his addition is a hollow space through the inversion of the image. Here in The fourth dimension of ‘The Metaphorical Basement’, time has drawn two works together separated by a year in the real world and collapsed them into one singular item. A palimpsest not only of The Real-World Basement but of artworks with very different starting points

Over a period of time more work emerged. Shreds of evidence from recent history preserved in cubes of resin, like Jurassic Park’s dinosaur DNA embedded in amber. 

An earlier collaboration between two of the artists involved in this exhibition began in 2014, also unwittingly, with Alistair Woods ‘Subjected To Change’ exhibition. After building a sculptural installation in ‘The Basement’ Alistair then spent two weeks building new elements into the original work before a closing event that presented the metamorphosed work. The original work still very much present but now part of a much larger piece. The work not only utilised the found object as material to build sculpture but also subtle interventions directly onto walls and other existing items such as the gas and electricity meters. Elements remain to this day along with a gold leaf disc on one wall.

Two and a half years later during the installation of Pippa Eason’s ‘Set in Stone’ exhibition, she asked the question as to whether she could remove one of the remaining pieces of graffiti from Alistair’s exhibition. As a joke we asked Alistair via Twitter if he objected to this two year old remnant of his time spent at Basement being removed, to which he responded with ‘of course, I wondered when someone was going to want to get rid of it.’ Upon returning home from work at the end of that day’s installation, I discovered that Pippa had not removed it but rather changed the nature of Alistair’s piece to suit her own work.

Over the years that particular piece has been integral to many other artists work, Jill & Josh and their Dead Petz, Lou Hazelwood and others. As part of the last exhibition at Basement the show’s curator, a recent graduate of The Slade School of Art, Ruby Waterhouse asked if she could remove the piece, to which I said yes, although it would have been amusing to ask Alistair and Pippa. Once again I found that the piece had not been removed but Pippa’s layer had been removed leaving behind Alistair’s work beneath, although now scuffed and faded from the attempt to remove it.

Amusingly the work by Ruby, sited in this particular alcove involved a cabinet and objects, as had Alistair’s work nearly a decade earlier. It feels like the more that happens in The Basement, the more artists become enticed, encouraged, sometimes led to work in symbiosis with the slowly changing environment. And this is one of the benefits of working in such an environment, one that is not returned to the tabula rasa of white walls at the end of each exhibition. The environment becomes a three way dialogue between it, artist past and artist present. All the while setting some unknown parameters for artist future.

Pippa and Alistair’s new collaborative work for ‘The Metaphorical Basement takes the dimensions of their unwitting collaboration in ‘The Basement’ and provides a template for a repeat of the same circumstances that led to the original, only two weeks apart rather than two years, yet still with no prior knowledge of what each other would do. A control experiment as to how the practice of each individual has developed in the decade since.

Two pieces in the exhibition are about reconstruction and trying to piece together an idea of the past from what is left behind. In 2018 Italian artist Emilie Telese realised a project with Sheffield artist Michael Borkowsky, in which they transformed The Basement into a scented kingdom of perfumes. The front exhibition space acted as a studio-cum-laboratory in which Borkowsky encouraged visitors to use his kit to create perfumes of their own. In the rear half of the space every surface was covered with images of Emilia in various performance guises. The space was then coated with a base layer of perfume and then all areas of bare skin in each image was coated with a different specially made perfume to match the image. One for floor, one for ceiling and one for each wall.

As with many exhibitions that we have dealt with at BasementArtsProject where audio works are involved, this exhibition proved that scent is every bit as sculptural as any object produced in three dimensions. Whilst you cannot deny the presence of massive bronze or stone sculptures, the presence of sound and smell can be even more inescapable, taking up far more space in terms of the volume of an area. Now, having exhumed tattered remnants of Emilie’s designs that have remained hidden behind black cloth for the last five years, they hang, scent long gone, on the wall of ‘The Metaphorical Basement’ a hint of what once was. Now a small jar stands on a glass shelf filled with dust from The Basement from which you can get an olfactory sense of our subterranean art environment instead.

All of the projects so far have very different starting points, and the degrees of separation have been dictated by the dimension of time. The next project though looks at the stages of production of artworks from conception through making, exhibiting and their life beyond. Scattered throughout this exhibition are finished artworks by Keith Ackerman, John Barber, Jeffrey Knopf and Edward Mortimer, as well as maquettes and digitised versions of ‘finished’ objects. Keith and John work pretty much exclusively in three-dimensions, while Jeff also does but there is often a digital two-dimensional stage. Sat on Jeff’s work bench, amongst tools and works-in-progress is a finished piece by John Barber entitled ‘Holy Polygons’. Its placement is not a snub to this lovely piece in Carrera Marble by John, but a point to ponder about the importance of preparatory work and consideration of when a piece is ‘finished’. On the opposite side of the room hung from the ceiling as you walk in the door is the maquette for ‘Holy Polygons’ made from parts of an old Meccano set. The importance of this practice piece cannot be understated as it is the tool allowing the artist to understand the nature of what he was trying to achieve in the final piece.

In the case of Keith Ackerman, his workings begin with two-dimensional drawings before small practice pieces are produced. A very different methodology than John’s for teasing out the third-dimension. Back in 2019 BasementArtsProject commissioned Keith to produce a scaled up version of a 2014 sculpture called ‘Jacob’s Ladder; a table top sized piece that he had carved in Ledmore Marble. The 2019 ‘Jacob’s Ladder’ sculpture, made from Tadcaster Limestone and finished post-covid in 2022, weighs 6.75tonnes and stands 9ft tall in a nearby park that we created as a community project in which to site it.

The work of Jeffrey Knopf whose studio we are presenting this exhibition in, is often but not always produced in three-dimensions. His practice revolves around the practice of three-dimensional scanning and printing. In this instance Jeff’s collaboration began with a, yet again, unintentional work in which he scanned and produced a 3D print of ‘Jacob’s Ladder’ and then three even smaller versions.

The larger one of the three now stands as an exhibit in this exhibition, and if you look among the objects on his desk you will see various other modified versions of this work. Is this now an artwork in its own right? Or, is it documentation and where does the 3D visualisation sit within these questions.

Elsewhere in the exhibition are some schiatto rilievo style 3D prints created by Knopf from Museum-held casts of the Parthenon/Elgin Marbles, these were recently exhibited in Athens, Greece as part of the ‘Plot’ exhibition. Here, the nature of authenticity is questioned through the continued appropriation of museum objects by artists and historians alike.

On a plinth at the centre of the room stands a piece by Keith called ‘Light After Dark’ a finished piece presented as such, but at a lower level another object whose shape seems to echo that of ‘Light After Dark’. When seeing this object in Keith’s study I mistook the piece as being some kind of test for the display of the aforementioned artwork, but when asked about it Keith had no idea what they were. After a bit of questioning he finally worked out where the pieces had come from but said that there was no connection between the two. This answer made me all the more determined to show these seemingly random objects that had been placed together for no reason, as an example of how subliminal experience, ideas and processes can be. I am not suggesting that one thing in any way led to the other, but as a random happenstance It feels like there is an unconscious connection.

The presentation of these works are surrounded by an aggregation of dust, chipping and rubble from the production of Jacob’s Ladder and Holy Polygons. In amongst this are some 3D printed versions of the cores produced by the drilling process for Holy Polygons and slivers of chipping from Jacob’s Ladder.

Returning to Jeff’s bench as a site for preparation doubling as a site for display we also find a finished work by ‘Crazy Eddie’ Mortimer. A large and heavy ceramic interpretation of Boris Karloff’s portrayal of Frankenstein’s Monster, previously exhibited at BasementArtsProject in early 2023. Once again, like ‘Holy Polygons’, the finished work sits amongst fragments of things being worked on, things that have not necessarily reached a stage that could be referred to as finished. Yet on the wall nearby sits a tiny 3D cast of the same object, a tiny iridescent plastic facsimile. The questions arising here address issues of copyright, mass production and mass consumption, transportation and portability, and the possibility of collaboration despite the separation of individuals by distance, whether it be town, city or country.

Similarly, thumbnail size facsimiles of other pieces by Mortimer, too big for the purpose of this exhibition such as his ceramic ape heads adorn the walls in the manner of finished artworks.

Part of the process of archeology is piecing things together to form a picture from fragments. The inevitable gaps left by the bits that have perished over time are left to the imagination to fill in. In the case of Silvia Liebig and Griet Beyaert, whose recent project ‘Junction’ was separated by the miles between Silvia’s base in Dortmund and Griet’s in Leeds, we have had to dismantle the work from it’s place in the Basement and reconstruct it in ‘The Metaphorical Basement’. The complexity, of the piece led to careful photographic documentation and a numbering system in order to rebuild it as faithfully as possible. The piece was reconstructed in about six hours at ‘The Metaphorical Basement’ by technicians Amy Kitchingman and Evelyn Davies in lieu of the artists now back in Germany and Leeds respectively. There are elements of Silvia and Griet’s work missing, these are the sound and video elements.

The sound world of ‘The Basement’ is captured in a recording of the video recording made during the exhibition. It is occasionally present in its metaphorical interpretation, bleeding in and out of the proceedings. Maybe there is a point at which experiencing the work of Silvia you may also experience the collaborative sound work of Griet, but again this relies on a certain amount of happenstance or sleuthing. The original work is accessible on headphones either via this link in the text or the QR Code elsewhere in the exhibition. Other sections of the audio environment contain work by myself, and the classical guitarist Clare Angel Bonner who played two concerts in September this year; one, a free gig next to ‘Jacob’s Ladder in which passing members of the public could join us to watch and listen, and a second in the Basement later on that evening. Illuminated by Silvia and Griet’s video work.

Much of this exhibition is about looking in detail; searching, excavating, exhuming the past in order to gain something new from experiencing the old. Here the old sits alongside the new, sometimes even merging. New art created from old works.

No survey would be complete without trying to return to the origin’s of an idea, and our inaugural exhibition ‘This Is Our House’ by Kimbal Bumstead. This immersive exhibition presented to people our conception of how art needs to be a lived experience. The exhibition documented all of those who visited the show in real-time, allowing them to experience it as a party with art and a real world family at its heart. Even on the opening night ghosts of the recent past remained with us long after the party had ended. Sitting around the table in the kitchen having a drink before bed we became aware of the fact that the voices of all of the guests remained even though they had all long since departed.  The recordings, made and edited on the fly during the night, of people talking about their experience of being ‘in this house’ had been left looping in ‘The Basement’; the exhibition continuing long after it had closed to the public.

Marconi believed that a sound once made never goes away completely it just becomes inaudible and traces always remain. His invention of wireless telegraphy came from the belief that if powerful enough receivers could be built, then we could reach back into history and re-amplify those sounds and listen back as though they were recordings.

It may be that at some point, BasementArtsProject ceases to exist, a real and present danger every waking moment of every day right now, but, no matter what between the practice of folk like Marconi and all of those involved in the physical and digital archeology of our times, traces will always be able to found. The question is, what will we make of them?

The band in heaven plays my favourite song
Play it one more time
Play it all night long
Heaven | Talking Heads

Epilogue
Kimbal has been a continual presence throughout the life so far of BasementArtsProject, returning to contribute many times, whether it be exhibitions in other places, New York, Sweden, Germany, Greece, or in returning for our tenth anniversary exhibition ‘We Are Still Here’ in April 2021. This exhibition was sadly done under lock down conditions yet Kim’s enthusiasm for the project was undimmed and he was able improvise and create a virtual online exhibition that still had many people involved in its creation, bringing people together virtually when physically we couldn’t.

Art as Life as Art
The pandemic was a moment in the life of our community were everyone lost out in terms of art. With many people in South Leeds struggling to survive the every day poverty of existence the pandemic took this survival to new extremes with the local elements of our audience losing physical contact. During the pandemic we were able to finish our public sculpture commission from 2019, Jacob’s Ladder by Keith Ackerman, during which time many experienced the creation of this work at the roadside. It was, I believe, this visibility and the year long experience of free direct carving workshops with the community, that led to our audience for exhibitions returning fairly soon once lockdown was over.

BasementArtsProject has a collection, which is on permanent display in the kitchen, hallway and living room during opening hours for people to look at. A number of items in this exhibition have been taken from our collection of past exhibitors and added to the proceedings in ‘The Metaphorical Basement’. The most recent undergraduate to work with us in March of this year Loane Bobillier is represented by a photograph placed high up above Jeff’s desk in a similar manner to its display in the kitchen at home/Basement.

Above the door on the inside of the room is a single collaborative drawing by two children, my own, from when they were three and five years old, made during a performance/drawing work led by Kimbal at Tate Liverpool as part of the 2010 Independents Biennial. The children, including Lawrence my youngest, are also present in the image painted by another regular contributor Phill Hopkins in the form of a Christmas card. Phill has worked with BasementArtsProject many times over the years and is both a friend and supporter. His work is represented elsewhere in the form of two collage pieces made in collaboration with (at the time) BA student Jadene Imbusch, whose tent encampment surround Kimbal’s model Basement. Both of these projects were produced for the Yorkshire Sculpture International 2019 and addressed a massive issue locally, that of homelessness. Whilst Jadene’s encampments made their presence felt throughout the house, Phill built a home in the Basement. For his House Within A Home project in the Basement. Phill’s work is present elsewhere in the Manchester Contemporary this weekend with ‘The Art Court’. Every year Phill produces a photographic advent calendar distributed as a daily email during December to our subscriber list.

There is still much to do and many people to work with, projects stacking up whether they be located in ‘The Basement’ or in the public realm; a mural, two more public sculptures and more exhibitions than I can count on two hands. On the threshold of ‘The Metaphorical Basement’ is  Kimbal’s model of BasementArtsProject from that first ever exhibition, along with a work about student life and British Citizenry by Kristina Nenova. She stands at the threshold, guarded by The Frog (and Simon The Human) both of whom await their opportunity to enter the Basement in the next year as exhibitors, funding failures notwithstanding. A nod to ‘The Future Basement’.

We hope to see you there one day.

Bruce Davies | December 2023