The Self-Isolation Residency 20th April 2020: Day 22

Exploring Installation No. 1: 'Tension', The Holden Gallery, 2009, Antony Clarkson

I have decided that now is a good time to start to mix up my blog posts a little. My current project and painting are still progressing very nicely, but if I post photographs of the painting everyday I think it is likely to get a little boring for you reading this as sometimes the differences in it from day to day appear to be quite small although they may have take me a days painting to achieve them. It is therefore my intention to periodically intersperse posts about my current work with archival images of some of my earlier work with has some relevance to something I have been discussing recently.  As a great deal of my post yesterday talked about how I am considering if working with an installation piece might be an appropriate way to explore my current project more fully, I have decided to begin this new series of posts by going right back to the beginning of my career as an installation art and introducing you to 'Tension'.

It may not seem very likely but my installation work is actually a direct offshoot from my paintings, not so much the kind of painting that I am currently producing for my current project but from a very different form of painting which I created about 15 years ago and still make examples of today. 'Spatial paintings' and a form of 3 dimensional painting that I have been experimenting with since 2005, I will talk about them in much more detail at another point, but basically they use exactly the same 'technology' that a standard oil painting does however I manipulate this technology to create new ideas, shapes and forms. The main thing that these paintings rely upon for their success is the way that I stretch the canvas and the 'tension' that I create in doing so.

'Please mind your head', spatial painting, 2006, Antony Clarkson

'Conversation piece', spatial paining. 2007, Antony Clarkson

This connection with the tension of a material is very apparent in both my spatial paintings and in the installation Tension, it was far from being the starting point of the installation. Although this was my first true installation piece I had been considering how I would approach creating an installation when the opportunity arose. I knew that I very much wanted to work with 'space' as a material and I felt that when I did I really wanted to work with it in a sympathetic way. So when the opportunity to create an installation for the Holden Gallery came about I spent a great deal of time working with and getting to know the gallery.  I spent time there looking, listening and feeling both what the space had to offer and what I felt the space needed. Although this is an art gallery it is also part of a larger university complex, the upshot of that being that people are constantly using it as shortcut from their desired As to Bs. I decided that what I wanted to do was to disrupt these 'desire lines' at least for a short period of time. I wanted to put a wall right smack-bang in the gallery so that people could not rush through it without a second thought, I wanted to make them pause, if only for a few seconds and see the gallery space in a different way.

The unique architecture of the Holden Gallery was actually another feature which allowed me to make this concept a reality; half way down each side wall of the space the main walls are pierced by a double series of columns and arches. I quickly realised that these columns would be ideal as the 'stretcher'  for my 'painting', but on this occasion I didn't want to use canvas as my material. I wanted to work with a material that was almost immaterial, something fragile, something transparent. A material that if the people using the space so wished they could walk right through without any effort, only their respect for a piece of art would stop them doing it, and it did. So what was this mythical material that was so fragile but that I could stretch with tension across the whole with of the gallery to look so amazing? Simply ordinary supermarket cling-film .