Please Choose One January 10 February 10 March 10 April 10 May 10 June 10 July 10 August 10 September 10 October 10 November 10 December 10

Articles> Louise Richardson and Andrew Campbell

Louise Richardson and Andrew Campbell: Tales of Suspense
Green Pebble Winter 2009/2010 issue

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Louise Richardson has a forthcoming group show (A Winter's tale) at the Imagine Gallery, Long Melford. Suffolk, which starts on 29 November 2009.

The piece is mesmerising. A dress hangs suspended from a pole and is, for all intents and purposes, made of fur. Step up and study it more closely, and with some difficulty the optical illusion shifts to reveal that the fur is not fur at all, but thousands of nails painstakingly pushed through a length of muslin to settle into a pattern of copper swirls and waves.

How can 14,000 garden shed variety nails look so richly tactile?

And why, once the illusion has been revealed, does the artwork continue to be alluring and, yes, even beautiful?

Norwich-based artist Louise Richardson loves to spin a yarn and the more surprises she successfully weaves into her creations, the better. Thus Telling Tales, her dress of nails, is anything but the sensual, warm fabric it purports to be; and her flimsy, lyrical nightgowns - some taking flight with the help of insects, others having just come indoors with wet hems - turn out to be constructions of concrete and steel.

They are all, she says, alive with stories. ‘They have a presence which is on the edge of something that has happened, or might happen.’

Both Louise and her husband Andrew Campbell, with whom she exhibited at the King of Hearts in Norwich earlier this year, describe themselves as ‘object makers’ and concern themselves with the transition of materials. Just as Louise’s pieces - even those made using concrete - capture the essence of the butterfly and moth wings she likes to incorporate into her works, so Andrew’s canvases assume a much more solid and weighty presence than the sum of the materials he has used to make them.


‘Mine appear heavy and robust,’ says Andrew, ‘and yet the sentiment is very similar to Louise’s. In both our works, they’re constructed and built and made, and they are impressions of things.’
With master degrees from the Norwich School of Art (now Norwich University College of the Arts) Louise and Andrew are both members of the Norwich 20 Group. When not exhibiting as far afield as Switzerland, France, the Netherlands and Poland, they teach at the college where Andrew is a full-time course leader. Ten years ago The East Anglian Daily Times described their work as having ‘a detectable Norwich School idea factory influence with an emphasis on the transformation of materials’ but they have never wavered from their path and now, a decade on, their work continues to explore - very successfully, judging from their schedule of exhibitions - the ambivalence, and possibilities, that transformed materials hold for them.

‘We both have materials which are being transformed into a language,’ Andrew explains. ‘Some materials are what they are, but there’s also a complete alchemy going on.’

Having known one another for more than half their lives, Louise and Andrew believe that their language is, to some degree, a shared one. ‘We’ve been through a certain amount of growing up together, so we share the same type of experiences,’ Louise says as they sit in the sunshine in the courtyard of the King of Hearts; he, an easy-going, strong, shaggy-haired man; she, not dissimilar to the petite, waif-like beings she conjures up. ‘There must be something subliminal, although I can’t say particularly how.’

Andrew agrees. ‘[The King of Hearts] said that they saw a similarity in the work and so they decided to put both works together to see what happens. They said we were incredibly different, but similar. There must be some kind of fusion there.’

According to King of Hearts Exhibitions Manager Jay Tacon, Andrew and Louise ‘share a unique human spirit’ which it is encapsulating. ‘Coincidently they both work with neutral tones and revel in the exploration of texture, but it is the sincerity and depth found in their work that first fascinated me. There is a simplicity and ease in which spectators would connect to the pieces and admire them.’

In their home in North Norwich, Louise and Andrew work in separate spaces, with Andrew occupying the garage where he uses ‘a lot of water’. Sometimes the sounds emanating from the studio are of grinding, shifting and mixing; at other times all goes quiet. ‘When I’m making sculptures, the way objects meet is very important. If something needs to just kiss another object, then it should do that, rather than it being roughly put together. I have to work out how to stop these technical issues from getting in the way of how something looks. Bits of glue and Blu-Tack just don’t do it.’

Back in the house, Louise does her painstaking needlework and assembling surrounded by countless found items: feathers, eggs, wispy fabrics, buttons, sepia photographs and even milk bottles.

‘It’s almost like making a cake, really,’ she says as she good-naturedly ignores Andrew miming pushing shut her studio door against an avalanche of ‘stuff’. ‘I surround myself with lots of bits and then I tell myself stories. I go into story mode. I dive into it and come to a story.’

Like the collages she makes, Louise’s working practice contradicts itself. On the one hand she describes herself as being rushed and short of time – ‘my work is quite chaotic’ - yet time seems to slow right down for her as she sews each handmade stitch onto materials that are often frail and elusive, her thoughts deep in an imagined world.

She has long been fascinated by the concept of ‘unwearable’ clothing, hence the dress of nails, a gown made from the pages of her mother’s primary school maths book and even a bodice of hair. Being unwearable, she explains, renders the garment useless and instantly imbues it with a story. ‘It becomes this garment that somebody has made in an obsessed, strange way. I used to love doing life drawing and portraiture, images of people, but then I didn’t want what I created to be too specific about one person, I wanted it to be much more about the human context. Clothing expresses something about the wearer, the maker and even the person who discards it. And the viewer can identify with the piece.’

Ties is a framed, Victorian-style, hessian dress which has been dipped in concrete, its hem stained with what could be mud. The fabric looks frail and soft, yet it has had concrete added to it and is held together by wire stitches, creating a dichotomy Louise constantly strives for. And although a smattering of moths pull this surprisingly floaty shape skyward, the predominant impression is of a child in a nightgown. The soiled hem suggests the child is outdoors, a place where no child should be after bedtime.

In Settle (Green Pebble’s cover image), butterflies have landed onto a little girl’s smock and ‘bleed’ their colours onto the antique fabric, at first glance creating a visually pleasing, beautifully balanced composition. But what follows are questions that once more generate a feeling of disquiet. The cluster of butterflies around the neckline threaten to overwhelm the child; and why is her dress stained in the first place?

Louise often incorporates insects into her compositions; the idea of collections and the memories they contain are important to her. ‘Everything has its own history,’ she explains, pointing to collages incorporating old photographs, tiny blue egg shells, feathers and further butterflies.

‘I don’t use real butterflies,’ she hastens ­to add. ‘I couldn’t work with real insects.’

The exception is the moth in Louise’s favourite piece, Find it, Bind It, which she found dead on her windowsill. The character in Find it, Bind It tenderly tries to mend the moth’s wing, which, she feels, justifies using it.

The theme of insects continues in Bound, a wispy, almost gothic, sleeveless top which is itself pinned to the backboard like a butterfly. Woven with human hair off her father’s salon floor, it too conjures up a sense of preservation. ‘It wasn’t that nice to do,’ she confesses, ‘because it’s people’s hair, but there’s something quite playful about throwing these things in.’

Playful? Really?

This piece, more than any of the others, evokes something sinister. It is the uncomfortable sensation of knowing that what the eye perceives as a thing of beauty, in fact has strangely uncomfortable, almost voodoo, origins.

Neither is it possible to stroke the piece to establish whether the hair is scratchy or silky, menacing or pleasant, since it is ensconced in a glass case, just like Snow White.

Many of Louise’s works are framed. This has been done partly to provide protection, but also to add a layer of distance. Louise likens the glass to the empty jam jar people use to capture and contain insects. ‘It’s a bit of something stopped. You suddenly think, “I’ve got you, you’re not going anywhere”.’

If Louise strives to capture a single, tiny, ethereal moment in a bubble of time, Andrew is busily condensing the history of man into a few, elemental shapes. From a point of view which is often from up a ladder, or out at sea, no less.

Andrew Campbell’s large concrete shapes sit comfortably beside his wife’s lighter work, even though the surfaces of his compositions – rough, cracked and weathered - evoke the monumental. A painter and an artist, his most recent canvases, for that is what they are, incorporate just three basic components: the surface of the earth, a ladder, and a small steel house.

The houses, he says, symbolize people, beings or dwellings. When they are positioned on the upper edge of the canvas, they reference previous existences; the people who have been here before us. If they are open-ended, the dwellings have been vacated. Solid houses represent occupied spaces.

Inspired by his view of the coast from his surf board, the canvases can be viewed as cliffs with the sky above and sea below. But take a moment to change perspective, and the sea could be the tilled earth with the sea behind.

Andrew delights in the imagery’s ability to become different things to different people. And with the house-shapes breaking the canvas by sitting on the edge of the frame, a slight change in perspective sees the ladders leading up; or down.

‘Sitting out at sea and looking back at land, is quite a strange place to be because you’re sitting there, floating, with your own thoughts. And in Norfolk, not a lot of surfing happens. Then, when bits fall off the cliffs before your eyes, you’re seeing elements that have never been seen by anyone else.’

This sensation of having been transported back in time to that of earliest man pervades the topography of Andrew’s work. The spaces are wide, raw and powerful. The houses are small and precarious.

‘I am quite interested in what is sculpture and what is art,’ he explains, stopping beside Place, a sculpture which changes from being a beautifully polished nickel collection plate into a landscape with a pond pooling at the bottom of a hill. The steel house-shape on the edge of the pond once more references settlements; and there is the implication of hands scooping water.

Next he comes to a polished bronze balloon, To Remember. He explains the torturous, and extremely funny, journey he had to make to create the film Drop of him dropping a similar gold-coloured balloon off the side of a fishing boat several miles out to sea. ‘The whole thing was bonkers,’ he says. ‘But if I was going to leave a gold dot at the bottom of the sea where no one would ever find it, I wanted it to be a bit of struggle.’

He hopes that, as with the rock face of Norfolk’s cliffs, someone will one day find the gold balloon and see it for the very first time since its journey began. How long that journey will be, or if the gold balloon will ever surface, of course no one knows.

Like his wife, Andrew is interested in who has ‘been here before’.

And so, whether the work is a canvas, or a sculpture made from found items, or a even piece of scorched wood, Andrew’s work evokes an image of a nomadic group of men and women out under an endless sky, moving away, relocating, starting afresh in a new place.

‘They are,’ he says, ‘on the edge of the earth, and on the edge of the dark sky’.

Over the years Louise Richardson has exhibited with Buckenham Galleries in Southwold, Suffolk; Montpelier Studio in London; the Contemporary British Art Show at the Royal College of Art in London; Robert Sandelson, Cork Street, London; and in numerous London art fairs; as well as further afield in Zurich, The Netherlands, Germany, Poland and Austria.

Andrew Campbell’s exhibitions include two solo shows at Robert Sandelson, Cork St, London; The Society of Scottish Artists at the RSA in Edinburgh; and numerous London Art Fairs. He has also exhibited in many group exhibitions including Kettle’s Yard Open in Cambridge.

Louise Richardson’s work can be viewed on flickr
Read Louise Richardson's Blog
Andrew Campbell’s work on Flickr
Read Andrew Campbell's Blog

For a copy of the latest issue of Green Pebble, please visit one of the stockists listed here. For a back copy of this article, please send the name of the article and issue number, your name and address, and a cheque for £3.50 made payable to 'Green Pebble' to: Green Pebble, Roos Hall Studio, Bungay Road, Beccles, NR34 8HE, Suffolk.

Back to directory of articles