The Self-Isolation Residency 6th June 2020: Day 69

Exploring Installation No. 9.2: 'Composition in White (Sculpture),
501 Artist Residency, China 2011, Antony Clarkson

Yesterday I began some note about my second large installation piece in China, 'Composition in White (Sculpture) by setting the scene of how the commission came into being, tonight I'd like to talk a little bit about the ideas behind the piece itself. As I said when I was first given a guest tour of the Sculpture Gallery at the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute it was during their end of year degree show. In many ways it can be said that a great deal of Chinese are is 'traditional' to the extent of being old-fashioned. On this occasion, and my research tells me regularly, the sculpture gallery was filled with a large number of beautifully crafted but small and unambitious sculpture on plinths the kind of things that you could imagine being reproduced for sale in home furnishing stores throughout the world. There was nothing wrong with this work per se, as I say it was beautifully sculpted but in its concept it was somewhat unchallengeing  and, we. domestic. In a way this is of no great surprise as many Chinese arts graduates do progress on to design houses where they create objet to furnish the worlds sitting rooms. I didn't set out to challenge this approach to sculpture as such, but I think that I felt a certain disappointment at the lake of perspective that the work displayed.

One thing that did interest me was, that due to the relatively small scale of the work on display in the exhibition, was that nearly every piece being shown was presented on the ubiquitous white, cubic, plinth of various sizes. now I have spoken at length about my interest in sculptural plinths in the past, so I won't return to that subject in too much detail right now. But needless to say when I say this work being presented in this way, the classical sculptural presentation if you like in a gallery specifically designed to exhibit sculptures, it started to trigger ideas. In some ways the simplest of thes is a question that I have asked before; if an artist puts any form of 3D object upon a plinth does it become a sculpture? I have experimented with this notion both in essays and in sculptural forms myself, but here I was being asked to create something situation specific for a sculpture gallery full of sculpture on plinths, I really felt that this was an ideal opportunity to aske the question again but on a much larger scale.