The Self-Isolation Residency 24th may 2020: Day 56

Exploring Sculpture No. : 'Self Portrait with Jenga', found objects,  2011, Antony Clarkson

Today I'm going to return to another piece of work which I created whilst on the Cow House Studios Artist Residency in 2011. Last tile I talked about this time period it was in reference to my experimental Installation piece 'Difference and Repetition'; today I would like to consider a very closely related piece made at approximately the same time, 'Self Portrait with Jenga'.

Actually this piece also has echos of 'Sculpture and Plinth' as well, they certainly have a strong family relationship in their looks, dimensions, phenomenology, and composition. As I've talked about previously many of these pieces come into being through the process of 'play'; in many ways 'Self Portrait with Jenga' my be one of the best examples of this process if for no better reason that it integrates a 'game' into its structure. When Cow House Studios isn't playing host to its artists in residence it provides 'art education for children, teens and adults; facilities for colleges, schools and artist-led groups', certainly when I did the residency there in 2011 the main part of this community was teens and young adults. This meant that aside from the plethora of art teaching materials that I had to play with there were also an amount of recreational materials including a set of giant outdoor Jenga blocks. As a sculptor engaged in the area of play nothing could be more perfect.

And so I inevitably began to play with this set of Jenga as a child would do with building blocks, I say that but this child has a mathematical bent which tends to lead their playtimes  into what could be considered an area of perfectionism bordering upon the obsessive. I soon began to develop structures and patterns within my play, lines of symmetry that were reminiscent in my early experiments of stone architecture and leading on in their final incarnation to what I can only describe as 'physiological' architecture. This was realised in the final form of the piece when I began to experiment with patterns that were reminiscent of the curvatures of the vertebral column. As this pattern began to develop I was both fascinated by is natural perfection and by its personal relevance; I myself have a congenital back deformation known as  spina bifida occulta which at times gives me great pain just to remind me that I have it but I am thankful to say nothing worse.

This personal link to the structure that I was now forming assured me that I had the right perspective on this piece in that it was developing the nature of a self portrait, but as a set of Jenga comes with a limited amount of pieces this defines the maximum dimensions of the piece that I could create in this way. These varieties of restrictions of scale within a piece of sculpture are where the nature of the plinth was conceived. To be viewed correctly, and in this case I felt that it was essential that this piece as a self portrait reflected an anthropomorphic scale of my own, in the region of 6 feet tall, I wanted to raise the piece to be considered both at eye level but also to be reminiscent of the spatiality of my spine. As this was a piece created from 'found objects' and this case, wooden objects, I wanted to have a plinth that  had a similar feel to the piece, not a part of it as such, as in 'Sculpture and Plinth', but to have that same feel as the sculpture itself;the echos of 'sculpture and Plinth' actually abound through this piece, as both pieces rely on their components being balance rather than fixed together. As it happened I was already resting the based of my own spine on the exact plinth I required.