A defining characteristic of his work has been a sustained commitment to the conceptual synthesis of contemporary and historical sources, in particular, the exploration of three-dimensional line, structure and pattern.
He has persistently worked within contested areas of textile practice, embroidery, pattern, lace and recently floral imagery. With an engineer as a grandfather, you begin to understand the influence of structure and softness on his formative years. On completing his BA, Brennand-Wood continued to specialise in embroidery. Sign up to view the whole essay and download the PDF for anytime access on your computer, tablet or smartphone.
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The above preview is unformatted text. Found what you're looking for? Not the one? Search for your essay title Related GCSE Art essays Art Evaluation These five paintings that I analyzed and studied very deeply all had a connection with death, the five paintings, 'life giver', destination', 'lost souls', 'elements' and 'isolation' all had a big impact on to my final painting. Edward Hooper Artist Study Coursework There are never any personal objects in the painting, that give people any sort of identity, or character.
Passions and obsessions evaluation. The first artist I looked at was Leonid Afremov, I The Psychological World of the Artist which appears to be a pet or comforting presence because it is playing with the necklace. Howard Arkley was an Australian artist, born in Melbourne. The bare bones for Sadie were underway in as I listened to a play on Radio 4.
The programme was suddenly and bleakly interrupted to announce the sinking of a ship in the Falklands. Without consciously thinking, the coloration of the work shifted towards a much darker palette; one suggestive of invasive and destructive forces. Collage material was added from a collection of old books.
I wanted staccato phrases and lines of text without a context, symbolic of fragmentary messages. Do we select phrases or do they select us? My working method at the time was heavily influenced by the indeterminacy and chance procedures of John Cage. I viewed chance as a liberating presence in my decision-making, one that would hopefully lead to unexpected areas of enquiry.
Sadie was never for sale, the graphite drawing and hatched quality of the piece was something I wanted to live with and understand. In typical fashion I made a connection back to archaeology, specifically Pompeii. It was the way the pumice dust from the volcano had encased people and objects during the eruption.
Object writing relies on the assemblage; the knotting together of objects to create meaning. The objects in Clinker were sourced from my studio: layers of fine coloured sand were built up over the surface gradually obscuring and unifying the individual forms. Clinker is a term my grandparents used to describe the residue in a grate after a coal fire, as such it seemed an apt title for the Dead Zone. I loved the organization of the spaces, the preparation for the afterlife. It seemed to me that whether it was tomb robbers in antiquity or archaeologists in the present the net result was the same, the stripping out and desecration of a ritual space.
You really wanted there to be a tomb that nobody could ever find. Residue is a response to the containment and robbing of artefacts. An arch formed of railway lines and boarded in red defines a room space. Within the work are references to Egyptian objects and an overhead plan of a tomb. I very much viewed the gilded, stitched old fabrics as sand, blowing into and over the surface of the work. Sections of the mesh were cut and moved, objects removed and replaced.
Residue is an icon to the rationalization of destruction. By all the laws of logic I should have sold Archive in I was just about to begin a residency in Perth, Western Australia for six months. On reflection, the influence of Archive becomes more obvious with every passing year.
Ostensibly I was trying to make another archaeological dig inspired work, not dissimilar to Residue. Thread and wire were analogous to sand or silt slowly covering and obscuring the embroidered and stitched shapes.
I liked the fact that Archive almost reconstituted itself into another multi-cultural flag, albeit one with no apparent country.
Its importance retrospectively is that it pointed the way to a use and appreciation of historical textiles as a site for exploration. Technically that to which I was attracted, i. Archive is really the point at which the early minimal music inspired works morphs into something quite different. For my residency in Perth, the University provided a studio which was completely bare except for a table and chair. I always regretted this curtailment of the compositional enquiry. The pieces I hung on the studio hooks were all unfinished; as they swung back and forth on the wall I began to see another set of possibilities.
In future I would experiment with pieces that retained a sense of fluidity, Journey to Shiloh and On the Way to a Little Way —86 would be two good examples. As a cathartic response to the situation I made a number of small sculptural pieces based on a carpenters vice, two hewn slabs of wood separated by a screw thread, within which was trapped a mass of thread and fabric.
Symbolically I saw myself as the thread element being crushed by the slowly descending jaws of the vice. When I showed the work to friends they viewed the thread as pushing outwards a far more affirmative reading.
Sometimes you think of an idea, sometimes you build it. A strong feature of all these pieces was that they appeared to hang in a form that defied structural analysis. Talk-Talk is a conversation in parenthesis; tiny sections of verbiage are talking at, as opposed to, each other.
Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time Time to die. What I was trying to convey was the overwhelming sense of wonder that you experienced as you walked through the city streets.
Giant video screens, thousands of lights, signs and cartoon colours everywhere. Within the cities you had the most exquisite fusion of old and new, I could leave a main street in Kyoto and veer into a completely different world. Over several visits it never changed, looking for all the world like an early Christo wrapped sculpture.
Any thoughts I already had about the dialogue between the contemporary and the historical were re-enforced by my visits to Japan. Someone once told me that the lucky Japanese were those who had been brought up in a traditional mode but who now felt free to embrace the contemporary. What I learned from them was an attitude to materials.
When we look at something even before we intellectually compute its function we on a more primal basis read its construction. Japanese artists fuse materials together exceptionally well, which is one good reason why so much of their work has such a sublime quality. When I came home after that first trip I wanted to be Japanese and I certainly wanted to spend more time there. Passage makes reference to the beginnings of my study of historic textiles as a site for a contemporary artist; from this point the dialogue between my work and the past would grow with each successive year.
My early involvement in textiles centred on an exploration of materials and technique. Ideas, I continued to pull in from the fine arts. The mid to late 80s mark the point where this began to change. At that stage I was still teaching at Goldsmiths where there was a lot of interaction between students in textiles and fine art.
If someone from outside our department came in and used the words decorative or patterned it was invariably a negative or critical response. I began to ask myself questions as to why important foundation stones of my practice were being contextualized in such a pejorative manner. So why is it that textiles still have such a reduced status within the art world. The Caucasian has remained on my wall ever since, I look at it most evenings and still marvel at the suspension of imagery as it floats within the field.
Slow Turning p52, Made for the International Textile Competition in Kyoto where it was awarded the Fine Art Prize, Slow Turning was the largest of the carpet design orientated works of the mid to late 80s. Specifically in this case the Cloud Collar, a circular device derived from the aperture at the top of a tent through which the smoke exited. The design became synonymous with the entrance to another world, another personal connection to escapism. Early notes in my ideas book indicate that I was making a connection to Passage in terms of displacement with a desire to create a movable mandala that physically could be turned by the viewer.
The piece was drawn up in my sketchbook over several pages, exploring divisions and patterns with outline suggestions for materials, indicative but not fully worked out. I always like to begin with a basic overview but with plenty of creative space for things to develop in the studio.
As the work began, I became increasingly fascinated with the layering of structures one on top of another. I very much wanted the viewer to have an opportunity to rotate the work and enjoy the possibilities.
To emphasize this further I built into the work a percussive musical box, a ratchet system that plays as the piece is turned. Retrospectively the layering and optical nature of the individual sections continues to fascinate. In particular the resourcing of very distinctive culturally orientated patternings. In addition to the authentic, are faux approximations of archetypal patterns rendered in alternative media e.
Furnishing fabric increasingly interested me at this time. I enjoyed travel and I particularly enjoyed working in new places. Consequently there are several works that reference both internalized and physical journeys.
Diviner was included in the Galerie Ra Reliefs exhibition in Amsterdam in late For the train spotters amongst us the Bird Man in Diviner appears in You Are Here several years later, floating down a river of music. Symbolically he represents me in both pieces. Before the Ra exhibition finished I had moved eastwards to Japan for six months. I had a tiny house and a studio at the Kyoto City University of the Arts.
The work made during this residency was shown over Christmas at Gallery Gallery in Kyoto. Part of my reason for being back in Japan was to research artists for a forthcoming exhibition of Japanese fibreworks I was about to curate through Goldsmiths College where I still worked.
Diviner was used as the invitation card for the Gallery Gallery exhibition; it had therefore represented me in two quite distinctive cultures in a comparatively short time frame.
The dominant image in Navigator is that of a maze, another reference to feeling lost in life and seeking a new direction. Navigator makes reference to both the internal quest for insight and the external desire for an understanding of who and where we are. In that respect, the installation of all four pieces moving up and down across the surface of the wall may well also evoke the satellites and probes we send into outer space.
Navigator is also the first piece where the fabric inlay is used as a major visual device. I was sitting on the quay in Hobart, Tasmania thinking that the next stop might well be the South Pole. At that stage of my life I had a fairly regular Australian-Japanese axis.
Often flying from one country to the other without going back to the UK. Port of Call picks up on an interest I had in Japanese kanji, which in turn related to a primary interest in pictograms. You can read the drawing as a board game, a constant metaphor at that time for the quiet internalized dissatisfaction with aspects of my life. Did I throw the dice and move forward up the ladder or slide down a snake?
The symbols around the edge refer to the Tasmanian mountains visible from the quay, the harbour and a semaphore-signalling tower. The Mills and Boon romantic covers used for the board game were sourced from endless car boot sales.
Physical geography and history were the two subjects at school, apart from art, that I really liked. In many ways they are both concerned with the layering and accessing of information that has been subjected to outside forces. To cut into or excavate strata is to take a journey back through time.
What is found can have a highly subjective interpretation, particularly in relation to historical events. Equally the study of archaeology allows us to speculate about history via the proximity of objects found side-by-side, layerby-layer.
We assume a level of understanding that may well be entirely conjectural interpretation. There was always a lot of interest and talk about the pursuit of enlightenment. A psychiatrist I met in Australia once told me that a large percentage of his patients were the result of the anxiety caused by people having no definable belief system anymore.
Anyway, I decided to make a work based on an Indian ritual temple door, like the bridge the door is often used as a symbol of transition from one place to another.
Still personally concerned with which direction to take within my own life I decided to make a work that spiritually confuses, it seemed a far more realistic outcome. As a family we regularly holidayed in the south and Avebury was a site we visited many times. Thankfully there are no fences or restrictions so you can imagine what it might have been like in the past.
I particularly liked the telling of stories and the imagining of a visual landscape that had both a spiritual and topographical dimension. I became increasingly interested in mapping as a means to understand myself. Overlays as its title would suggest is a good example of the many allusions, quotes and clues that can coexist in just one locality.
What I always liked about Avebury was that nobody really knows why it was built; each successive generation finds within its structure something that has a contemporary resonance.
I think it does but not in an obvious way. Changing studios and meeting people can exert a more immediate effect than say landscape. Hide and Seek was made especially for the 3rd International Betonac Prize, a lace competition in Belgium. The genesis of the work emanated from a late night visit to a Freemantle bookshop in Western Australia with my good friend, the artist Pam Gaunt.
I bought a book on sixteenth century lace designs; I felt an immediate connection to the geometrical nature of the work. I particularly liked the asymmetrical nature of the images and the speculative origin of their subject matter. Lace was a natural area for me to study.
It had been an important part of my early investigations into thread structures. I was now interested in it for another very different reason. It seemed a timely moment to reclaim one of the most female of fabrics from a male standpoint. Both architects and interior designers used lace designs as a source for decorative detail. Lace in the late twentieth century when Hide and Seek was begun had very different connotations; it was largely a fabric associated with lingerie with very specific connotations of fragility and femininity.
All of this I wanted to challenge, so my first task was to engender a gestalt in the viewer to shock them into re-looking at this fabric from another perspective. I decided to change the scale, increasing the image so it enveloped the viewer; I also altered the way the image was physically made. Traditionally bobbin lace is formed from the twisting of a thread around a pin, my lace is very different. Fabric is inlaid into the surface of a grooved wooden panel, so the fabric is partially buried in the wood.
This process has strong archaeological associations, the finding and conjecture of material. I really enjoyed the frisson between the sensuality of the fabric and the harder, painted overlaid surface of the panel; duality and the collision of opposites is a quality I return to constantly.
Hide and Seek was the first of my lace works. It won First Prize in Belgium, which I took to be a good omen to continue the inquiry. In art, truth and reality start at the point when you no longer understand what you are doing or what you know. My father was dying and we all knew it was just a matter of time. The original notebook pages talk about developing the work as a magic carpet, how individual panels might be replaced from venue to venue.
In many ways the work came into my head perfectly formed: it would be twenty-five wooden panels each inlaid with either brass or copper.
The composition of each panel was to be drawn from lace; I would in effect construct a metallic lace by driving rolled metallic foils into the surface of the painted wood. If you render a lace in metal as opposed to thread it has a very different set of qualities.
You could press any panel of The Light into human flesh and it would leave an imprint, it therefore challenged assumptions of lace as a fragile, delicate fabric.
There are additional quotes in the overall form to the lateral minimal floor sculptures of Carl Andre. I was also interested around this period in the concept of loose geometry as I felt it related to the visual reverberation I witnessed in early geometrical textiles.
I was moving towards a better understanding and appreciation of that which cannot be controlled, all of which had a clear personal dimension. The work was never conceived of as any kind of religious object. It did however take on a somewhat Byzantine feel as it progressed and I did see it as a requiem of sorts for my father. Several years later it was shown in a church in Belgium laid at an angle in front of the altar, managing at one stroke to connect Andre and spirituality.
One cousin had been researching the family and was very excited about how what I did connected to the past. It appeared that my great grandfathers family had made wood blocks and dye for the textile industry. The Light without the metal foils is essentially twenty-five wood blocks; it would have been perfectly possible to make a print from each one. I suddenly found that both of my maternal grandparents had strong textile roots, so was my decision to undertake a textile degree based on chance or genes?
I really needed to understand that connection at that moment, as it reinforced a sense of lineage that something of my father would continue in me. In an increasingly over theorized art world, it seems a perfectly acceptable premise to think through the act of making. I think with my hands, eyes and head. Ideas change through the making. You have to be open to where the work might want to go next. As a society we prioritize the conscious mind, believing that conscious decision-making is more measured and rational.
My unconscious mind invariably makes really interesting choices; to be out of control is both liberating and exciting. As we got closer I began to notice that the colour of the shore was really odd, it seemed to be shimmering in the light. A closer inspection revealed that well over half the beach material was made up of shards of pottery and coloured glass. It was a kaleidoscope of willow patterns, fluted glass and pebbles; everything was so very smooth and polished.
The material came from an eroded landfill site that had been slowly swept out to sea; time had worked its magic and removed the broken edges. There was something in these fragmented tiny patterns that seemed cathartic to my sense of loss. The majority of my lace works prior to had been based on photographs or pattern books. On a visit to the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester I noticed several cases containing fragments of comparable laces.
I began to think it would be exciting to research real lace and the Whitworth seemed the perfect venue. The four lighter coloured panels are based on the original sixteenth century lace images; the five red panels in the work are drawn from a section of late seventeenth century Milanese, bobbin lace sourced from the collection. The work is a meditation on perfection; how like our own skin fabric changes through use and wear. I clad the surface in split African tile enhancing the flayed quality within the piece.
The fabric inlay is an exquisite sensuous, grey Armani chenille I bought as a roll end in London. It would have made a beautiful dress before I cut it into tiny pieces. Their understanding of an idea has clearly been enhanced by the feel, touch and fragrance of the piece. This is particularly true of textiles: the scent of the oils in wool, the shimmer of silk, the brush of a fabric across your skin, the deep sensual softness of chenille are all incredibly emotive qualities.
You begin to learn how to read with all of your senses. I find it personally almost impossible now to make anything completely flat; I need to feel the idea. I was always a big fan of the Rothko room at the original Tate on Millbank. On one particular visit it suddenly popped into my head were these paintings in oil or an early form of acrylic?
Unable to tell just by looking, I sidled over, moved my head closer to one of the works and tried to catch the scent of any residual solvent, the point being that white spirit or turpentine would signify oil paint. Made for the exhibition Recycling: a zeitgeist survey that looked at all aspects of the reuse and reinvention of materials. The work is based on an American memory quilt, a patchwork that recycled clothing from one family, usually over a number of years. The finished quilt contained fragments of cloth that visually charted the evolution of the family members.
I decided to make my own version using the clothes of two people, male and female. Compositionally the form is influenced by board games and puzzles. Symbolically I enjoyed the relationship between the path of life and chance movement across a board dictated by the throw of a dice.
To an extent the circular shapes may be read as counters, the lines as pathways, options to consider. Sometimes emotionally you go up ladders, mostly you slide down snakes. Technically the process of binding individual shapes with silk fabric relates to the title of the work. The act of wrapping is a powerful emotive gesture, rich in symbolic importance, swaddled at birth and mummified at death, bookended by cloth.
The idea was to raise extra pin money by selling the threads to a jeweller. Drizzling parties became very fashionable not just for the money but also for the amusement of getting together and deconstructing textiles. Ladies would have drizzling boxes with tiny spools on which the extracted threads could be wound. Retrospectively the process has another dimension entirely. You Are Here is a visual map, a personal Internet that charts influences both formative and current which inform my work.
The field of the piece references a seventeenth century English embroidered fabric. Running horizontally across the base is a section of a John Cage score, whose use of chance procedures as a means of generating new ideas has been a constant source of inspiration. The musical river denotes a passing of time. Scattered across the work are references to diagrammatic stitch structures, early writing systems, lace designs, the iconography of Aboriginal painting, Central Asian suzani fabrics, Caucasian carpet designs, Kazakh felt, pre-historic mazes, African textiles, Scandinavian solar discs, Mbuti drawings, Ashanti stamp printing, Uzbekistan textiles and the Rorschach ink test.
You Are Here may be read in any direction, a new pathway across the piece will result in alternative perhaps unexpected configurations of idea and image. The title of the work refers to the maps, traditionally found in most town centres indicating sites of interest. Since the advent of modernism patterning has been regarded as trivial, a view not shared by non-western cultures.
I believe that patterns are encoded language: the study of meta-patterns — patterns that connect — reveal much in anthropological terms about our spiritual, cultural and sociological history. Physically the construction methodology of You Are Here mirrors the content of the work. Fragments of earlier eras can be glimpsed through time veils of colour. The red fabric inlay is a reference to the continuity of memory through the bloodline, the reciting of stories that subtly evolve over time.
For the first time as part of my research I had access to pathology slides, the majority of which were surprisingly beautiful. As I looked at these images I became aware of an implied connection between the cellular aspect of both humans and textiles.
I realized that we lived in a culture and could also grow a culture within a Petri dish; in both cases we have become fearful of the outcome. The core imagery is drawn from textile, geographical and biological sources. In my mind this echoed cellular invasion, the omnipresent threat of new diseases and viruses — most of which are constantly evolving — and our fear of cultural change via trade or immigration as we assimilate new ideas and artefacts.
The tiny raised dots on the surface allude to the African scarification technique of packing. Clay or ash is packed into a wound to raise the surface of the flesh; its one of many references in my work to a relationship between earth and human skin.
I was attending a very long design team meeting in London for a music project I was working on. Sat at the table listening to progress reports from other consultants I suddenly had the idea for Destroy the Heart. Ostensibly an extension of my then current interest in cellular invasion, it also relates to the breakdown of a relationship. As you move across the work both the colour and the core imagery gradually deteriorate. The red becomes a black and finally a dark rusted brittle brown desert.
The 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa who now own the work installed Destroy the Heart in the opposite direction to how I originally envisaged it. Thus it goes from death to life as opposed to life to death. This may well have something to do with how Japanese text is read but I enjoy this more positive reading of the work. John Cage talked about encouraging composers to work with sounds they found difficult or unappealing, in his case transistor radios.
In my world the visual equivalent would have been floral textiles. They were astonishingly beautiful images. At more or less the same time appeared the Year of the Artist, a nationwide scheme organised by the Regional Arts Boards to fund residencies by artists in unusual settings.
I realised that I needed to take on that which I was most apprehensive about the floral and applied for a grant. My plan was to work alongside my studio photographer James Austin and a large supplier and wholesaler of fresh flowers Zwetsloots Ltd. Recognizing that textiles historically have referenced floral imagery as a source for textile patterning, the Stars Underfoot photographs subverted that tradition via a process of utilizing hundreds of real flowers as a medium not subject: I would draw with a flower.
This formal inversion — the flower as media not image — allowed unexpected and challenging associations to emerge. Compositionally the imagery is recognizable, yet provocative in its deconstruction and re-invention of historical textile schematic traditions. On one level I was trying to understand how imagery had traditionally evolved. I also had to work very quickly, as the flowers died within hours of being cut, all of which I found very liberating as the majority of my studio works took several weeks to complete.
I was up in Auckland for a few days to judge a competition and for some unknown reason decided to visit a New Age fair in town. Whilst mooching around the various tents, I came across a booth where you could have your personal aura photographed and read. I noticed that the majority of the images had a figure surrounded by a wash of affirmative blues or yellows.
The five works that made up the Consequence of Proximities series form a bridge between the Stars Underfoot flower photographs and the Field of Centres computerized machine embroideries. The concept was to subject the flower photograph Invisible Architecture to a series of technical experimentation and chart the ensuing cause and effect on the core image. As the series progressed the works became increasingly three dimensional, the imagery literally began to push itself into space.
If you put All Night Flight alongside Invisible Architecture the imagery might appear similar, the real difference is in the physical depth. Holographic in feel, All Night Flight encourages the viewer to access the work from many distinct viewing angles. Crystallized Movements is the first work directly influenced by the Gulf War.
Compositionally the piece re-creates a flag constructed from hundreds of embroidered flowers, which refer to medal ribbons and poppies. The white base of the work, which is constructed from over a thousand toy soldiers, further enhances this; the figures record a veritable killing field, slain people preserved in crystalline white paint.
What intrigued me at COLLECT was that people were initially unaware of the figures; they simply viewed the ground as an interesting surface on which the floral flag floated. Excited by the Stars Underfoot photographic images I began to think about extending the enquiry back into textiles.
The problem was the amount of units required. The flower photographs had used on average — flowers, so how was I going to replicate that in cloth or stitch? World of Echoes is formed from a collage of several photographic images; I wanted to prove to myself that a traditional medallion carpet composition could be built optically, not drawn. The closest analogy I have for how the act of making makes me feel is that of falling in love.
When you meet someone new for the first time you want to spend all the time in the world together, to see him or her last thing at night and first thing in the morning. You share intensity, a series of memories that belongs only to two people. All of this I experience when I make: I spend time with a piece; I listen to what it says and most importantly where it wants to go next. Above all I have a relationship with the idea and the process.
A friend said to me that I thought about art all of the time, after a while I decided she was right. I began tinkering with the placement of the embroideries and everything started to change, I worked most of the night but I did manage to resolve the work by the following morning.
Thought that is planned is tradition Thought that is unplanned is imagination Thought that is both is spirit Old Sufi saying. Process is reflective of content, and this machine allows an idea to be constantly revised at all stages of its evolution.
Imagery is drawn on paper, scanned, digitized and machined out on cloth, during which programmes can be overridden and adapted.
During the last eight years I have endeavored to view the process of machining as a continuous series of open-ended experimentation. The purity of machine embroidery was always going to be an issue. In terms of construction, the reliefs explore the illusionary space between two and three dimensions, combining machine embroidery, fabric, acrylic paint, metal, glass, thread and collage. Initially based on the Stars Underfoot flower installations, the relief panels reference spatial and geometric orientations sourced from early stitched and woven textiles, in particular suzani cloths.
The relief works are colourful, dramatic, rhythmic and almost holographic in feel with intense detail that merges at a distance into strongly optical configurations. Most importantly, the physical depth enables the viewer to interact with the work as they move across the visual field. They have a kinetic dimension, one that has become more pronounced in the most recent Vase works, which literally project into space.
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