Like a child obsessed the deconstruction of a brand new toy, Richard Wilson repeatedly discusses the end of modernity through his dissections of post industrial form and location, resulting in an amalgamation of personal fascinations that could’ve begun somewhere within the toy box as a boy.
With a career concerning site-specific and public works often a reaction to and an integral part of the space, Wilson, one of Britain’s most prominent installation artists, has now created an exhibition to tour.
"Irons In The Fire" was the artists’ first national touring exhibition for the UK beginning at Leeds Metropolitan University, using sketchbooks, drawings and maquettes constructed to form filing cabinets and shelving units: an archive to the artist’s often elaborate workings, including ideas for yet unresolved works, and featuring important works that have never been exhibited previously.
From his early work such as "Big Dipper" back in the eighties, constructed for the Chisenhale Gallery and consisting of a large aluminium cast loop, canted to mirror the physical journey of a fairground ride, began the initial reference to a kind of bodily disorientation from an object integral to a specific environment, which remained one of the artists’ key notes.
"It’s an amalgamation of all sorts of things: it’s that point before getting on a plane; it’s that point of turning some pages in a book on Walter de Maria; and then it’s also picking up a manual on how to wire your house, and there is a photograph of floorboards pulled up”
As with "20:50", the reflective sea of sump oil installed in the Saatchi Gallery, which was conceived on a family holiday, the concept model made from a Portuguese shoebox. The artist placed the viewer at the mid-point of a symmetrical visual plane of a perfect and impenetrable reflection.
This was Wilson employing an economy of means resulting in numerous poetic interpretations, relating a kind of grand purity from a source of pollution, and is considered by certain critics as the very definition of installation, just a single facet of a resonating body of work drawing from his often eclectic explorations of site-specific spatial order and de-industrialisation.
It’s the concern with the anatomy of form and its relation to the viewer that interested the artist. This exploration into unique and Provocative spatial dislocations, was a collision between the human appropriation of space and the artists’ interest in social, architectural, and geographical elements.
This was clearly illustrated by Wilson’s work "Set North For Japan", located in Nakasato (Japan) and created for the Tsumari Art Triennial. The artist himself expressed the concern of being "culturally adrift, and acutely aware of wanting not to parachute into the area, dump his work and leave".
This initial feeling formed the foundations of that public work and became directly biographical as the artist took the structure of his own house in Bermondsey, South London and relocated it to the other side of the globe.
The building appeared as if torn from the British street by a great wind and dumped unceremoniously into the splendour of the rural province in a scene from The Wizard Of Oz.
This skeleton is then abandoned after attempting to maintain its origins, displaced in the landscape by 74 degrees 33 minutes and 2 seconds from true north, causing the works subversion by its attempt to hold with the perpendicular and horizontal of the UK.
"Irons In The Fire" was a catalogue for the various modes that Wilson has utilised over a quarter of a century, often dismantling the mundane and practical through architectural interventions to discover the poetics of space.
This resulting in a broad scope of extremes ranging from the ephemeral to the monumental use of industrial fabrics, often illusory and spectacular, forming the viewers unique destination.
This was the intersection "between" two contexts: that of the artists’ imagination and the physicality and history of the location. As the artist stated “There is a moment where they align themselves and are digested mentally into becoming the nucleus of a possible idea."
With the inception of Wilson’s art and the vehicle of filing cabinets and shelving units with its exploded contents, it seemed we had returned to that toy box with a child-like exuberance.
