The Self-Isolation Residency 15th may 2020: Day 47

Exploring Sculpture No. 6: 'Mary's Table', handmade table, ream of A4 paper, pencils , 2011, Antony Clarkson

So today I’m returning to my travels through my sculpture back catalogue. I have previously talked about the installation piece ‘Pilgrimage’ which I created for the Workhouse Exhibition at Arts Council England’s Hive building in Manchester in 2011, but this was not the only piece that I futured in this show. Alongside it I exhibited a new, freestanding, sculpture which I had just completed entitled ‘Mary’s Table’.
As the theme behind this exhibition was to create “Work on a theme of intensive labour.” with the starting point for thinking about this idea the symbol of Manchester, ‘the worker bee’ I had multiple options in how I could begin to approach this idea. One of these directions lay in the consideration of the work of a fellow artist and friend of mine Mary Griffiths. Mary makes what can be thought of negative drawings by coating a surface, at this time sheets of A4 paper, with highly burnished graphite which she then incises fine lines into. The drawings are exquisite, fragile pieces which I had long admired, but I was also intrigued by the creative process behind these works. As I say I had know Mary for some years at this time, I had watched these works and the ideas behind them evolve, so I was actually quite well aware of how they were actually created, this however did not deter me from exploring theoretical fantasies about how they might be made. How for instance did Mary coat and polish a sheet of A4 paper with the layer of graphite which had become her trademark?

This was the beginning of my thoughts in this direction, I loved the fantastic idea that she would cover the paper by means of a huge number of pencils somehow held together in a block just the size of an A4 sheet of paper.  Once I had this notion in my head as a starting point everything else came together; if she used this A4 shaped block of pencils to coat the paper didn’t it also make sense that she would she also have an A4  shaped table to create them on? Now I had the basics of the piece in my head it was easy to complete it, I built the A4 table that I needed easily enough and placed a ream of A4 paper on top of that. The more difficult, or at least most time-consuming, part of the sculpture, what might be called the sculpture proper, as I was very much thinking of the table in the form of a plinth (ref. Exploring Sculpture No. 5, Sculpture and plinth), was creating the block of pencils. This was the part that really tied the whole piece together as you will see from the photographs it brought with it another key element in my thinking for this piece, indeed the thing that for me really finished the piece. The hexagonal ‘honeycomb’ like structure that I created with the pencils directly referenced the creations of famous Manchester’s worker bees.