“BODIES, MOUNTAINS AND BOMBS”

The House for An Art Lover, GLASGOW 2016

How the idea for the exhibition developed and what’s in it.

(The Pavillion Gallery, House for an Art Lover, Bellahouston Park, Glasgow, Jan 2016)

The idea behind this exhibition came to me during a period of serious disabling illness, sciatica, in Autumn 2014, when I was unable to move my body without severe pain. This event unfortunately coincided with preparations for a six-week visit to India to work with the Indian artists, Ganesh and Santana Gohain. Since it was impossible for me to travel, the flight bookings were cancelled and the trip postponed.

This confinement of a normally, very active life inevitably perhaps, triggered introspection about how I lived my life and, about my work. Why did I do it? What was it about and what could it be about when and if, I recovered from this disability? Looking back over the many years of working as a sculptor, I tried to create in my mind, an overview of the many works I have made and in the various places and contexts in which they were constructed. This overview seemed to expose a discontinuity and perhaps confusion in the variability of subjects and working processes I had engaged with over the years, and a lack of clear direction or indeed overall purpose.

This was somewhat dispiriting, and I began to wonder if I’d overlooked something? Then I realised that this was a conceptual exercise and what was missing was the works themselves. My memory of these works is variable, a few re-generate intensely powerful, rich, memororable experiences but most, are more vaguely brought to mind, in groups or batches made in particular times and places, and in the context of the prevailing personal circumstances, as if they were separate, unrelated.

So it seemed to me that I needed to actually see them all together, in order to see them as an oeuvre, more holistically. But how and where could this be achieved?

Coincidently, the building and expansion of the Art centre and new Pavilion Gallery at House for an Art Lover were coming to fruition and I saw its first exhibition, that of Kenny Hunter’s work. Admiring the new gallery, (as well as the work) I let the thought afloat, that maybe; it is here in this place that all my works could come together? With that thought expressed informally and later, formally as a proposal with James Cosgrove, David Leslie and their Committee at HAL, and was delighted when it was accepted. I am pleased to augment the already long -standing relationship with HAL, including the installation in the Garden of “Paisley Date Palms” in 2009.

A public exhibition is, by its nature, a visual, tactile, space-occupying way to present ideas to other people to invite response, interaction and debate. It is very important to me that my work is critically appraised in a public domain for me to fully understand what I am doing, and how it is seen objectively.

The exhibition is selected from work from the last 25 years, since my first visit to India in 1989 and distils three strands of work from that period to the present. Bodies, mountains and bombs are the “subjects” of these strands and form the structural framework of the show and are roughly in chronological order.

Bodies

I began making sculpture with a background of being a figurative painter, with a love of and respect for the art of drawing from the live model and knew I wanted to make figurative sculpture. But didn’t quite know how I wanted them to look. As a full-time teacher, didn’t have time to research and develop the process of modelling from life and the lengthy processes of casting, so I looked to the simplest of ceramic process. Modelling, then firing. Firstly, making small squat figure-like forms but also, soon I became concerned with the control and manipulation of the surfaces, which of course would be fixed in the firing and experimented with patterned marks and impressed texts.

These early works were like putting a toe in the water before jumping, and I wanted to make life-size works, so developed the idea of modelling a form around my own body. I became aware of Anthony Gormley’s early work around this time and took encouragement from his intentions but his material process was quite different, his were casts of his body, mine were modelled from within. In a crouched position I built up a clay wall around my feet with a roughly 5cm gap between body and wall and continued all around the body and over my head. This took several days and of course in the breaks from modelling saw from the outside how it was forming. It looked remarkably similar to the small figures made earlier. The difference was that I became more conscious of the hollow body inside. Which was the trigger for and is a continuing influence on much of the figurative work in the exhibition. The hollow body was a place, the site of our consciousness. The necessity of hollowness in ceramics informs the reading of the works in an aknowledgement of the negative form within, an invisible presence of which the clay is its skin.

The use of floral decoration on the surface of architecture and sculpture came to me vividly of course, on trips to India and the first sculpture where I used such embellishment was the piece previously mentioned, “Paisley Date Palms” in the garden of House for an Art Lover. I was familiar with the ubiquitous “paisley pattern” but did not know the history of how it came to be so-called and through research; I came to think it an appropriate subject for this project for outdoor sculpture in this area relatively close to the Town.

The idea to make a three dimensional interpretation of a two dimensional “paisley” pattern intrigued and puzzled me, but the research told me that it was derived originally in the Middle East from a budding form of the Date Palm. This natural became the three-dimensional form of my sculpture and although I could not reproduce the astonishingly beautiful intricacy of the real paisley print and weave, I could emulate it by hand-pressing fragments of contemporary crocheted lace into the wet surface of the clay before firing.

I was so intrigued by this technique that I have continued to use it since then.  In the Classical sculpture seen in India it appeared to refer almost always to clothing or decorating the body varying from God to God, according to their different attributes. The floral decoration in my work similarly refers to clothing, jewellery, body decoration, and tattooing, sometimes exposing sometimes hiding the body below.

Mountains 

When I was a teenager living in, almost, the middle of England, mountains were exotic places. One had to go to them, in North Wales, Cumbria and Derbyshire, which from a distance, I saw them as recognisably shaped peaks, walking towards them and as you climb higher and higher, the peaks have long disappeared and vision is focussed on the immediate ground around and before you. Although achieving the peak is the goal of the climb, for me what I recall almost vividly are the paths, tracks, gulleys, chimneys and the myriad of rock surfaces you clambering over on the way up.

I took the memory of these experiences on visits to Japan and to India where mountains became the focus of the work. In Japan it was the “local” volcano, Mount Iwate, which at the time was cordoned off because of fear of imminent eruption. The peak was just visible from the stone carving site, so I carved a replica of the shape of the peak which, after an eruption might be irrevocably altered. The sculpture “Volcano and Bud” has its origin in this work. In India, I worked alongside the artist Ganesh Gohain who had recently returned from an inspiring visit to Lahdak in the southern Himalayas and in sharing our experiences we collaborated on an exhibition in which Mt Padhia , nearby, became the recurring theme in drawings and sculpture.

Bombs

I started to make “Flowerbombs” and “Seed Landmines” as a result of the vicarious experience of the wars in Afghanistan, then Iraq and now Syria through Television and Newspaper reportage. Though they are useless, ineffectual and perhaps even whimsical they are an expression of my horror, impotence and anger over the violence of these conflicts. Let us disperse flowers and seeds rather than shrapnel.

Peter Bevan

2015

 Acknowledgements

I would like to express my gratitude to;

James Cosgrove, David Leslie and Gemma Manion at House for an Art Lover, for the invitation to exhibit in the Pavilion Gallery and their enthusiasm in achieving it.

Katy West for seeing the works in progress and writing about them.

Emilka Radinska for safely firing the kiln at Glasgow Ceramic Studios.

Tommy, at West Coast Architectural Salvage, for the chimney pots.

Ganesh and Santana Gohain for their long-distance inspiration.

Barry Atherton, Mathew and Louise Scullion, Sarah and Peter Sumsion, and Beth Guest, for their encouragement and perceptive advice all along.

And finally, to all my family for their continuous support and patience.