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Green Pebble Magazine
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Articles> Louise Richardson and Andrew Campbell
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
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