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Second Nature at Tremenheere Sculpture Gardens Martin Holman
The second nature of artists is to make. And following close on that instinct for many practitioners is the desire to show. When a community of artists forms with that intention, as it does in Changeable Beast, the outcome is diversity on a level close to the bio-complexity of physical nature itself. Changeable Beast brings together 18 artists around their published core objective of “conversation and connection. A gathering to share ideas and explore our work.” They work independently and collaboratively, and are individually based in different parts of the UK. They get together to show their work, finding venues that somehow augment the concerns in their various practices. With a particular emphasis on materiality and environment, they tend towards expression in three dimensions. Their attitude to sculpture is open to adaptation; it is essentially experimental. The show “Second Nature” is a demonstration of those factors and commitments. As well as the group’s current affiliates, 11 more artists had been invited to show work alongside them, to widen the exchange that is the basis of their approach.
What becomes immediately apparent, however, is that some of the work is flat and wall mounted. Like Katie Houston’s drawing, 'Holding On', that relates to the artist’s performance on the show’s opening night and remains as a connection with an event that has no permanent physical form and is preserved in memory, through documentation and through any subsequent restaging. The pencil drawings by Andy Gomez, a multidisciplinary artist who also makes miniature sculptural diorama, bright imaginary space into the body of the gallery. His beautifully delineated Amulet Diorama fed on “supernature” with its therianthropes and isolated portals and rocky outcrops supposing their own folklore. If Gomez was introducing mythical shapeshifting in his enchanted fiction, Tessa Garland (above) was shifting from physical media from to the virtual. She channels her sculptural investigation through a camera lens onto Super 8 film. Her 'Island Garden' inserted an alternative space to the interior of the gallery, one in another location entirely, shaped by nature into a kind of barrenness and elaborated by culture. The first is a sandbank under blue sky populated by plants suited to dry climates. Cacti and such-like have intrigued shapes, a property carried into the second, man-made element in this unknown habitat. Mobile assemblages shot at angles rotated a concatenation of stuff. Maybe all had been found abandoned and gathered in beachcomber style. Bicycle wheels, clear plastic trays, marine floats and ties assume a new purpose, although that is hard to identify, as putative machines from a Rowland Emmett world. Are they meant to ward off intruders, like decoys, or reel in the imagination? For sound is part of Garland’s assemblage; so is the grainy texture of her type of film stock and its warm tone suggesting a work from the past. A surrealist—inflected sensibility suffuses this 'Island Garden', setting it in indefinite time. “Second Nature” is only the second collaborative project of this still new gathering (the first, “Material Gain”, took place in Richmond, Surrey, a year earlier). Its site was also a meeting place of quixotic nature in action and deliberated culture. Tremenheere Sculpture Gardens have both sprung from natural forces and been made to spring. The latter is driven by the ambition of the plant-specialist and horticultural hunter who has transformed unpromising farmland into mixed habitats for botanical samples both native to the wider region and involuntary in-comers, transported to west Cornwall by this arch-gardener’s sense of what his materials can be, how they can be modelled and by recognising nature’s need to propagate into future generations. Also setting the cue for the show is Tremenheere’s combination of “first nature” with the second nature of creative individuals. Modern sculpture is an integral part of the gardens’ identity. To this, Changeable Beast brought a temporary extension. The gardens roll towards the coast of Mount’s Bay, and the exhibition visitor might arrive by having walked up the beach, across the South West Coast path and up through lanes through land under cultivation. Sandy Layton’s 'Entanglement' will strike a chord with that arrival. The title conveys the appearance of the object because its open form comprises a helter-skelter of curved, rough-edged and extruded coloured ceramic strips through an improvised architecture of wooden slats, short pieces and long tacked together in an attempt to restrain the peristaltic slither of the long, raspingly red movement around and about inside it. So, what chord was that? Within its structure and raised on a tabletop, the churning core of the piece synthesised in metaphors of tense, twisting shapes a singular an experience of nature familiar to the sculpture’s viewers from the Cornish coast, who live in the face of nature. Not, however, that “Entanglement” is about nature; Layton describes it as “abstract”. But she allows the word “narrative” to follow and even qualifies that with the teasing phrase “familiar and elusive”. People who walk the beach fringing Mount’s Bay may well project onto the sculpture the “first nature” of, well, nature that refuses to conform to the common idea of a sandy interstice between sea and land. At this point in the country’s coastal geography, the beach changes identity at regular intervals, from tarry-coloured, gritty ground to a stretch of rocks and shale that then give over to soft sand before returning to stone. And on every part is the seabed vegetation ripped up from the depths by the roiling motions of the tide. Pigmented fronds of seaweed cellulose and other plant life regurgitated against the sea wall falls back with the retreating water line to dry in curvaceous mounds to be crunched underfoot as walkers. Those feet traverse continue to the coast path, cross rail line and absorb the muffled whine of the roadway soundscape and tramp grass and gorse while inhaling wild garlic. Thus, the “Entanglement” synthesised that ambience and brought it into the gallery at Tremenheere. There it mingled with further manifestations of the experience of nature channelled through making. Making calls upon the materials and ideas, and the technical agility to merge one with the other. In a sense, that is the “second nature” that artists hope to develop, that way of thinking that conceives a proposition in volumes and form, and can achieve it in three-dimensions or through another processing of media into a viewable event that is termed sculptural. So before entering the gallery, Rachael Causer’s vertebrae of soft-coloured pads were climbing in a wonky column up the building’s exterior. No pad appeared to be the same, in profile or size, but one sat upon the last to well above head height of a visitor. The composition was curious, needing closer scrutiny to discover its origins in a mix of plaster, wool and wood. Soft looking but firm, it had the determination of real nature to colonise a hospitable location. The same applied to Alex Hegazy’s 'Outlet', another creeping creation that had fastened onto building’s own outlets, of sorts. Climbing or falling, the skeins of stuff were spun around a downpipe, the way some plants exploit man-made structures, finding hospitable habitats for survival and growth in unlikely places. In this case, however, mankind was mostly the source of this accretion. In amongst the vegetation were human discards that had become litter, evidence of an assault on “first nature” comprised plastics, wire and other detritus. Yet there was a second narrative intertwined with it that offered a kind of biography of human behaviour. Here was suggested humans’ desire to be in nature, away from their constructed habitats, that is surprisingly moving. This engagement with natural systems continued inside the gallery in work such as Chuting Lee’s branching structure that seems to bring a human’s organising mind to the growth patterns of trees, wherein lies a distinct form of intelligence. Using an actual spruce, shorn of its needles, Lee’s addition of colour to some of the thicker branches as they emerge from residue of trunk at the middle of the composition recall circuit maps, like the London Underground’s and, more poignantly, diagrams of the venal and arterial network of the human body. The resonant thought with which the viewer is endowed is the continuity between man and tree, and the flow of life that connects them. The notion of flows in and out surrounds the orchestration of colour and line Diana Wolzak’s 'Living with Riddles', a trumpet-like structure laid horizontally. With that orientation and in this coastal location, oyster pots and fishing nets break up the initial abstract reading. The terms of its making become apparent with looking, reinforcing the image of fabrication, use, repair and then further use that goes with equipment in fishing. but why not think of nature, and shape and fine construction of flower heads?
These works are also quietly beautiful, in the way that nature consoles and captivates us. That impression is contained, too, in the prints and stoneware ceramics by Belinda Worsley. Her slow-paced reflections on floral form through maturity to decline, captivate with the intimacy of an idea that finds a medium. On this occasion, glazed stoneware that describes the swing and sway of petal heads dropped from the stem, so that those dainty figurines come to mind that decorate older people’s homes – done not to mock them but to embrace them and what they represent in generational terms. The delicate tonality of flowers has washed into the body of them a shadow imprinted on the body. Their beauty resembles a head that is observed, cherished and recognised for the life led that is caught near the point of disillusion and loss. Ellie Reid achieves a similar embodiment of fleeting effects in nature, but by different means. Scores of small, coloured steel discs pinned in orderly rows to a board in the open-air shimmer in the breeze. Called 'A Moment of Being', the correlation with experience of changing light is tangible in an image that is never still. A similar dynamism surrounded Tina Culverhouse three flagpoles flying flags throughout the exhibition (above). Placed on the incline up to one of the highest points at Tremenheere, 'Peaked to White, Three Flags for Peace (triangulated with St. Michael’s Mount)' were similarly exposed to the elements, which can be fierce at that point overlooking the bay across windows blow and rain falls at speed. Whereas Reid’s materials are almost indestructible in this environment, one senses that the flags will give way at some point in a demise that Culverhouse intends as an expression of her own contemplation of fleetingness, impermanence. Somehow, that sensation attaches itself to Clare Jarrett’s 'Ramets', 2024, placed on the edge of in incline in this part of the gardens that climb to a highline dominated by one of Tremenheere’s permanent, open-air sculptures, a Greek temple on springs that sways with wind. Jarrett’s implantation resembles a cluster of bamboo canes desiccated into a deathly whiteness that would not withstand those same winds that set the temple’s metallic columns in motion. Yet the ramets colony remains and close examination reveals them not to be wood and fibre, but porcelain, stoneware and a steel armature, that gives it a presence. What significance has the title? A ramet is a horticultural term suggesting a clone capable of maintaining an independent existence. Already, the notion of “nature” is being toyed with, examined and placed into the categories of transformation.
Stepping back into the gallery building, toying with language and form circulated around Nicky Hirst’s colony of canes of a more utilitarian variety, walking canes that one can imagine the artist sourcing by rummaging in the kind of shops that stock discarded and unwanted items from other lives, perhaps those that have run their course – although, conceivably, not much running was latterly involved (above). Hirst sees other forms in the stick’s simple, crooked silhouette – lanterns, maybe, as in living organisms like Physalis alkekengi or Chinese Lantern with its nodding head, or as in the portable lighting source. In any manifestation, as object or metaphor, each definition has value in a natural setting like Tremenheere. The contributions of Susan Young and Tania Salha also convey insistent movement. But they project a more voluptuous, volcanic variety. Salha’s 'Creature of Habit' has coloured craggy forms sprouting from the meeting point of two tripods, where one stand is inverted and locked into the apex of the other to crate a sort of metallic pelvis. Young’s 'Trawl of Crimson Mist' could be the accidental catch from a Shakespearean “multitudinous sea incarnadine” sea, a virulently crimson and tumourescent mass set on spreading across the wall and floor of the gallery by its multiple flecked and macular ovals interconnected arterially by a tracery of strings and bloated channels. The “second nature” of that work suggests a distortion of nature, some dastardly hybrids akin to Nigel Kneale’s Quatermass, an alien presence implanted in fiction. It relied on the public’s imagination for maximum effect as a metaphor for the perilous state of the world, thwarted by man’s interference nature. Artists, and Kneale was no less, activate imagination at every stage of the creative process towards new and refined ideas.
Artists engaged with three-dimensional form, whom the wider world know as sculptors, 'Regroup II' by Carolyn Whittaker, made from crushed wheelbarrows, suggests an after-life of traditional garden equipment as mechanical insects, while Matthew Foster 'Compression II' gives a pair of jauntily hooped, spindly legs to a concertina arrangement of wooden oddments, fence-like in their verticality, similarly jacketed in a summery array of dots and stripes. Marcus Harvey adds to that festive mood, with Sandcastle, cast for longevity in stoneware. So too, at first sight, does Ornela Novello’s inflatable parrot jacked out of a cardboard box or – as some gull-weary seaside humans might wish – being coaxed definitively into it. That combination of hybridity and mass-production reaches a highpoint with Ian Dawson’s 'Lokerley 6 Remix' (2023). This work pushes in a direction that no other artist follows here in terms of materiality and its potential for sculpture’s future. Dawson utilises laser scanning and 3D printing, transferring drawings on screen into a programme that carves out an object from recycled plastic and endows the result it with a synthetic surface in every sense. It seems that every facet is integral and continuous to one process. Being neither additive nor reductive in the traditional sense, it could be described as extruded. The fact of it, placed on the ridge among grasses that leads people upstairs to the building’s upper level, is exciting, mysterious and challenging. The task of explaining is sufficiently hard that interpretation devolves either into a subjective judgement or the prolonged act of wordless looking. The is what sculpture is all about; and Dawson captures that. This work provides the note to end on. The form is indexical, derived from an ancient fossil flint, one of man’s first implements for shaping matter by hand. The first sculpture could have emerged this way. With some wit, Dawson reproduces its appearance with the most advanced method of doing fashioning an object in matter. Over millennia, the need to do so has been second nature.
Second Nature, organised by Changeable Beast, took place at the Gallery at Tremenheere Sculpture Gardens, 10 August to 7 September 2024 https://www.changeablebeast.org/
Participating artists
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