The Self-Isolation Residency 28th April 2020: Day 30

Exploring Installation No. 3: 'Floor Plan', Finnish Academy of Fine Art, Helsinki, 2010, Antony Clarkson

I'm really enjoying the opportunity to revisit some of my older works with you in between updates on my new for for the Self Isolation Residency. For many of you this will be the first time that you have 'seen' many of these works at all, for me it is an interesting time to reflect on these works whilst I am on enforced lockdown. I would have to say that it's quite rare as a working artist to be able to afford the time to review older pieces in this way so with your indulgence I will make the most of the chance to do this.

Tonight I am presenting you with 'Floor Plan'  created especially to be a part of a group  exhibition called 'Manu' at the Finnish Academy of Fine Art's Gallery in Helsinki, Finland.  I was delighted to have my work selected to be part of this exhibition, although it came with its own inbuilt set of problems or opportunities as I prefer to think of them. At this time I was really just starting to cut my teeth, as it were, in the field of installation so to be not only invited to exhibit work as part of this exhibition at such a significant gallery, giving my work its first international experience, but to be also asked to create a new installation to range throughout all of the galleries spaces was a great honour.

As I had now formulated my operating system for how to approach a new installation commission I obviously was intending to apply it to this piece. My approach to an installation, as I've mentioned before, is to start a 'conversation' with the space, to really get to know it so that I can assess what it needs to make people think about the space itself rather than just passing through it. Unfortunately, as I at first thought, this would be impossible on this occasion as there was no way for me to go and spend the type of extended period of time in Helsinki that this conversation would normally require.  However I needed as much information about the space as I could possibly glean and so I started an in depth conversation with the exhibition curator, Petri Hytönen, and asked him to be my 'senses' in his daily engagement with the space. I also asked him to send me any photos and documentation about the the space to help me to get this sense of it that I was looking for.  I was very fortunate that one of the documents that arrived via email was a copy of a floor plan of the whole gallery complete with notes and all the galleries dimensions; see below.

This simple document was the thing that really allowed me to connect with the space. I have a very good spatial mind, I can visualise and engage with a 3 dimensional space within my head which allows to me 'see' and 'walk' through the space as if I am physically in it. This floor plan was the thing that really allowed me to start to see the gallery as a real place and build up an intimacy with.

But on this occasion the floor plan became more fore me, I became intrigued by the document itself, how this 2 dimensional piece of A4 paper represented the 3 dimensional space of the gallery.  I also liked the way that it had traveled to me and I wanted to take it back encapsulated in the work that I intended to present within the gallery.  This ideas of transit from Finland to the UK and then back to Finland became central to thinking, it also connected to some drawings/sculptures that I was working on at this period, with the intention of showing in this exhibition ( I will talk more about these in a future blog post).

 As I worked through these notions I came to the conclusion that what I really wanted to do was to take back to Finland the flat A4 floor plan which I had been sent to me and to recreate it full size on the actual 2 dimensional floor of the gallery itself.  This process was both simple and complicated, the idea was simple, to hand cut to scale all of the text, arrows and details form the original document is a simple idea, the process in precise and painstaking and in the end took all of the time available to me to complete it. This preparation process was only phase one of the installation, phase two was the actual 'installation' which involved me going to Helsinki in the February of 2010 in 10 foot snow drifts to spend a week on my hands and knees affixing the piece; but to this day this is one of my favorite pieces and it is one  has gone on to influence other pieces later in my career, so I wouldn't have missed a moment of it!