Page 52 - Studio International - November 1969

where they do not have to compete with simi- It may not be important for the spectator to
lar boundaries and enclosures of architectural translate literally the associations in the
space. Flat uncluttered grassland provides an artist's mind when he was working, but he
ideal setting. Here the sculptures become does not want to be guilty of trying to sup-
unique, enclosing and articulating a minute press them for the sake of purely abstract ex-
proportion of boundless space; acting as a go- pression.
between, relating this space to the com- John Fowler's present concern is with three-
paratively minute human scale.' dimensional geometry, in particular the
David Evison doesn't use steel for its metallic geometry of the sphere and how far it can be
properties, rather because it's easy to stick pushed before it loses its identity. Buck-
together. He uses it a bit like wood: not open minster Fuller's work on spheres has been
girders, but slightly squared-off lengths, extremely important to him in these experi-
which might otherwise be used for fences. 7 ments. Fowler has just resumed sculpture
Usefully they come in various sizes. He welds after a long gap; nevertheless what he is doing
and screws it together, but disguises the joins now is not unrelated to work of 1967, where
as far as possible. Colour is important and (non-geometric) involvement with heraldry
changes over the surface. Physical tangibility led him to make a three-dimensional flag as if
is explicitly not : 'I wanted to put the work out seen turned through 180 degrees. A similar
of the spectator's physical grasp'. The sculp- principle lies behind the large recent sphere
tures are self-contained. They don't move off composition, which works like an opened-out
into wider space. Extensions are ground- tennis ball and in which he arbitrarily breaks
based, movement in varying degrees upwards the rhythm of the unfolding pattern by making
and downwards. In essence Evison seems to the end sections only half tennis balls. When I
work as a builder involved with the different saw the work it was pale blue but the artist's
levels of a certain scale. His cage construc- feeling was that being 'round and quite sen-
tions in mixed media from last year and his sual' it should be slightly pink. To use several
current work on a smaller scale in plexiglass colours would, however, be a banal infringe-
show the same preoccupations. ment of the principles of geometry.
Gerard Hemsworth starts with an overall idea he ANNE SEYMOUR
wants to get across. He doesn't build up from
a unit. His interest is not in connecting shapes
8
or playing them off one against the other.
His involvement is with the spread of objects
on the ground and particularly with the way
they are spread. He imparts unexpected
subtlety of detail to these objects, which makes
each one at once familiar and horriblydifferent.
Their subdued colours—brown/grey, for exam-
ple—are not designed for neutrality. It is im-
portant that grey should be grey. Grey in
depth and grey on the surface. In his most
recent work he uses rough fibreglass, which
is visible through the colour like chopped
straw. It gives the surface a richer quality and
does away with the illusionism involved in
suggesting a solid lump of colour. For some-
thing so 'bland' and so 'minimal' these forms
are peculiarly intimate.
Working on a small, or comparatively small,
scale in (visibly) painted plywood, Alan Bark-
lay is more concerned at the moment with
remembered sensations than with the actual
penetration of sculpture by the human figure.
In Marion's window and Memories of a childhood
room, space is treated metaphorically. In the 10
former you can walk round the work and still
be in it. The inside and the outside come
together; the sun and the sea; the window is
in the sea and in the wall. There is a debt to
Matisse. In the latter, the small size and dis-
tance from standing height as you look down
at the work on the floor can be related to
looking back at memory from a long way off.
The formal language is one of squares and con-
tained squares. Marion's window started from
a square with a hole cut in it, from the
relationship between the square and the hole.
174