Page 45 - Studio International - October 1969

BF: But that isn't the motive in the use. I am
not beyond enjoying a piece of my own
sculpture either.
GB: May I ask you about the sand pieces ?
When and how did these come about?
BF: At the time of my first show in London, in
1966, I wanted to project the show as if in my
normal working situation. I made a sand piece.
This had an absolute contact and actuality
within the context of the show. This work
emphasized the importance of materials.
The piece was one hundredweight of sand
poured onto the floor, scooped four times from
the centre.
on: What of your use of sand to fill cloth
pieces, after you had abandoned resinating
them? What led you to it?
BF: It was an elegant solution to technical
difficulties identified as a problem at that time,
at the end of 1966. It allowed the pieces to be
moved easily.
GB: The plaster and resinated pieces were
heavy, cumbersome to move. Sand being
available nearly everywhere, these pieces could
be filled at the end of their various journeys.
BF: That's true. But the excitment of the solu-
tion to that technical problem was that dry
sand freely poured into a stitched shape be-
came an integrated, autonymous material state-
ment: the dialogue between the weight of the
sand and the structure of the cloth skin, the
modification of the stitched contour making
further shape. On another level, the exactness
of process was in evidence and exciting. It was
a big contributive factor. In a historical con-
text, I invented a new process for making
shape.
GB: How important do you feel scale is to your
operations?
BF: Again, scale is an educated notion. For
me, size is of importance. A sculpture has to be
the right size to do the right job.
In my sculpture involving four sand-filled
columns, the size of the units was just enough
to make the space between them as important
as any of the objects. Thinking of the sand and
hessian piece, Heap, where fifteen tubes of
hessian were filled with sand, size was deter-
mined by all sorts of factors, for instance, by
the width of the hessian, the structure of the
hessian against the permissible weight of sand
in any one tube, and the minimum diameter
of the thinnest tube against the action of dry
sand in a constricted space and the consequent
shape it makes with the skin.
GB: At all events, you do not set out to pro-
duce effects of scale, largeness of experience.
This, when it occurs, is incidental.
BF: Yes.
GB: What are your current preoccupations?
BF: My current preoccupation is the reali-
zation that if the lights went out the hard-core
emphasis of my sculptural world would cease
to exist. I am thinking seriously about light.
Recently, I have been making canvas pieces
which are motivated by thoughts about the
convention of painting. q