DEACON PYE

WILSON

Special thanks to Richard Deacon RA, William Pye FRBS, Richard Wilson RA, Mark Davy, Futurecity and Isabel Vasseur, ArtOffice

Kindly supported by

FIRST@108 Public Art Award

The Arts are once again a prominent part of our society and sculpture has an enormous part to play in articulating and engaging us with our public spaces. Sculpture is no longer an afterthought and has become crucial to the conception and understanding of our public spaces, inspiring better living and working environments.The Royal British Society of Sculptors is committed to promoting excellence and innovation in public art and through its First@108 Public Art Award offers a practising sculptor the opportunity to tackle the challenges of this demanding area for the first time. This exhibition was borne out of our commitment to stimulate interest, debate and appreciation of works in the public realm.

Richard Deacon RA, William Pye FRBS and Richard Wilson RA, the three British artists participating in the exhibition and series of talks have taken on the challenge of producing diverse, innovative and excellent public art. Their contribution to this genre is examined through the three stages of the process of producing a public artwork, from its conception, through the process of execution and to the public’s reception of the work. The displays and series of talks provide a rare and fascinating glimpse behind the scenes of these three very different public art commissions spanning nearly three decades. Each presented its own challenges in terms of physical and time constraints, audiences, budget and technical advances. The nature, scale and narrative of the works are informed by their sites and duration: a temporary, outdoor contribution to a Festival in the case of Deacon; a permanent, outdoor and urban work for the community in Pye’s city centre work and with Wilson’s work, a permanent, interior and monumental place of transit.

Our thanks go to curator Isabel Vasseur, Director of Art Office and sculptor Richard Deacon RA who have unearthed and collated fascinating archive material that tells the story of Nose to Nose, Beginning to End commissioned for the 1988 Glasgow Garden Festival. The Festival took place on a vast disused industrial site and was conceived as an event for public enjoyment and their appreciation of the newly landscaped area, which was enhanced by the presence of over 100 temporary outdoor sculptures. The huge crane base allocated to Deacon and formerly used for loading tanks onto warships and the visionary introduction by Vasseur of the artist to the shipbuilders, whose techniques and skill for transforming steel from two into three dimensions, were the stimuli for Deacon’s work. It urged a reassessment of the site and its functions.

We thank sculptor William Pye FRBS for his in depth account of the complexities of creating and installing Vannpaviljong, a highly interactive work permanently sited in the town square of Drammen, Norway in 2011. Incorporating roll-waving water over mirror polished stainless steel walls, it achieves a delicate balance between the technical mastery of the flow of water and the manipulation of steel. It creates a vibrant meeting place, mirroring the landscape, people and architecture of the once windswept square and evokes the clarity and purity of its Norwegian setting. It successfully achieves its aim in creating a work for the use and enjoyment of the public. Its proud reception shows the extent to which the community of Drammen has embraced Vannpaviljong.

We also extend our thanks to Mark Davy, Director of Futurecity and sculptor Richard Wilson RA for bringing us the first behind the scenes exhibition of Slipstream, 2014 created for Heathrow’s newly designed Terminal 2, The Queen’s Terminal, by Luis Vidal. At 70 metres, it is the longest sculpture in Europe and is designed using cutting-edge computer programming technology, usually employed by the aerospace industry. With this, Wilson and his team have accurately translated the volume of an aircraft’s movement through space. It achieves its aim of impressing, diverting and inspiring the vast travelling public passing through the cavernous halls of London’s hub airport and successfully creates a dynamic identity for this important gateway to the UK.

The artists and curators involved in this exhibition have made a seminal contribution to the important and most visible realm of sculptural practice. Their contributions to CONCEPTION EXECUTION RECEPTION are invaluable and we wish to thank them and the FIRST@108 Public Art Award and The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea without whose support this project would not have been possible.

Terry New President, Royal British Society of Sculptors

Richard Deacon RANose to Nose, Beginning to End

Curated by Isabel Vasseur, ArtOffice for the Glasgow

Garden Festival 1986–1988

Nose to Nose, Beginning to End Richard Deacon RA

Glasgow Garden Festival 1988

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Nose to Nose, Beginning to EndA reflection on Richard Deacon RA at the 1988 Glasgow Garden Festival

It was perhaps inevitable that Richard Deacon RA should make a major work for the 1988 Glasgow Garden Festival. He had been a luminous student of Peter Atkins at St Martin’s in the 1970s, had gone on to hold a number of notable exhibitions in the 1980s and had won the Turner Prize in 1987. Deacon was taking risks. He diced with the dangers of considering alternative sites to those offered by perpetually whitened galleries. Like a number of his contemporaries, Deacon was prepared to consider the weight of language and poetry as a valid addition to the orthodoxy of making, and the employment of materials. He was fearless, and in the matrix of unknowns in a Garden Festival one needed to be.

My role in the Glasgow Garden Festival was to judge the work of contemporary artists of the time, in the context of what I saw as the opportunities and even the dangers existing within the site and intent of the Festival. What advantage would it be to the artist’s work and to Glasgow? It was late in 1986 and after six years of promoting and working on public art projects in East Anglia I was glad to be charged with this huge task of populating the 120 acre Festival site on the banks of the Clyde with the artefacts of the imagination of others. It was not an undertaking for the faint – hearted artist or indeed the curator. This ambitious project was being assembled where the last fragments of Govan’s redundant industries had been cleared and poisonous earth extracted. Thatcher’s erasure of industrial evidence was to be completed to enable her Environment Minister, Michael Heseltine to regenerate its geography, replacing the scowling earth of its industrial past with a new green culture. This was to be the third of his five National Garden Festivals and as it happened the most successful.

With significant investment by the then well endowed Scottish Development Agency the Festival site was to be seeded with private and public sector organisations and agencies, all inhabiting well designed garden buildings amidst a carefully

fashioned and exotic landscape. However, into the mix of twisting paths and imported trees, temples and villas there were also to be inserted a giant roller coaster sponsored by Coca Cola, Glasgow’s bumbling elderly trams and tracks, a new Distiller’s sponsored bridge across the Clyde, and a 33 metre high Clydesdale Bank Tower, all flying the flag for Glasgow while injecting an obvious license to have fun. The intent was similar to that of the Festival of Britain in 1951, memorably described by William Feaver as having “a lightsome mood carefully poised between highly serious and merely knees up”.

This was the charged and cacophonous environment to which I was inviting artists to make a proposal for a new site-relevant work. Nearly all gave a positive response, with only two declaring that they were thwarted by the visual noise.

While inviting the artists to respond to the site and to the powerful evidence of Glasgow’s culture I also informed them of a number of connections I had made with Scottish fabricators and industries who were willing to supply studio space, materials, and fabricating skills. The 110 three dimensional installations I finally selected had to survive six months of some of the wettest weather the British Isles has to offer. The works had to be robust. They also had to survive the intense inspection of 4.2 million visitors.

The organisations we finally relied on demonstrated that not all West of Scotland industries had floundered. Those that had survived represented an important part of the historic River Clyde industrial culture. They were for the most part relieved to be invited to do something more exciting than provide waste paper baskets for the 120 acre Festival site. The companies who contributed facilities, materials and expertise to the art programme included Rolls Royce Aero Engines, British Steel, Cummings Engines Ltd., Ciba Geigy Plastics, the Forestry Commission, British Shipbuilders Training Ltd., International Paints, Scottish Galvanisers, ESAB Group, British Oxygen and most importantly and relevantly for this exhibition, Govan Shipbuilders. The shipyard provided expertise, studio space, and exceptional fabricating skills, allowing five artists to realise work which would have been impossible to achieve elsewhere.

Richard Deacon RA with the Nose to Nose, Beginning to End maquette 1987

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Curator, Isabel Vasseur in front of Nose to Nose, Beginning to End at the Glasgow Garden Festival 1988

I have listed this group of industries to emphasise their importance when curating public art of any scale, as they and their descendants have and continue to be an absolutely essential element for the realisation of three dimensional contemporary art. Moreover, the presumption that the craftsman’s contribution is purely utilitarian is, I suggest, a mistake, for many artists have a greater creative relationship with their fabricator than custom will admit, whatever the material the artist may employ. It is the business of the curator to foster this relationship, whilst at the same time protecting the artist from the distractions of the economic and political context of a commission. In 1988 the bringing together of Richard Deacon and Govan Shipbuilders was a particularly exciting and successful example of this brokerage of skills.

Witness to this fact was the crucial dialogue Richard Deacon had with two exceptionally skilled welders at Govan Shipyard. In the 2014 Tate catalogue which accompanies his one man show Deacon talks at length about this relationship and how he learnt of recently invented techniques which exploited steel in new ways suggesting new forms hitherto unrealisable. Once the very large (10 tons) Garden Festival work, Nose to Nose, Beginning to End was completed and installed, Deacon returned to Govan to explore further the techniques employed there. His second Govan work, Struck Dumb is, he suggests, a response and a summation of a number of circumstances including the threatened demise of the shipyards and a response to the novel skills he found there. The title explores the many levels of communication – poetry, nuance, command, inference – which are employed in any work of major artistic ambition. Nose to Nose, Beginning to End brought these qualities into brilliant relief.

At the time of writing, 14 April 2014, a BBC news item was broadcast which suggested that Govan Shipyard was about to be closed.

Isabel Vasseur April 2014

William Pye FRBSVannpaviljong

Drammen, Norway 2008–2011

VannpaviljongWilliam Pye FRBS

Drammen, Norway, 2011

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VannpaviljongWilliam Pye FRBS on the realisation of the project

The first decade of the twenty first century saw a proliferation of opportunities for artists posted on the internet. My assistant made it her business to trawl through these in search of projects that might be worth following up. Usually 90% of these are not appropriate for my consideration. However in 2007 she found one advertising a competition which looked promising. I don’t like entering competitions as they conspire to pitch artists against each other, but I am reconciled to the fact that it is a cross that we have to bear.

The brief asked for a major artwork incorporating water to form the central feature of the redesigned town centre of Drammen in Norway. The terms for entry were generous and well set out. Initially only an expression of interest accompanied by brief CV and images of work was required in order to be considered for the shortlist, so I went ahead and made the application.

Early in 2008, having made it to the shortlist, I travelled to Norway to be briefed with the other shortlisted artists. This visit provided the opportunity to learn all about Drammen, the background to the competition, and something of the other artists. The river Drammenselva in the Drammensfjord flows through the centre of the town dramatically dividing it in two. The north side had already been redeveloped with shops, bars and restaurants facing onto a grand open plaza leading up to a fine church seen against the backdrop of the mountainside.

In collaboration with the Komune, the local Chamber of Commerce had agreed to sponsor a major artwork to be the centrepiece of the new square on the south side of the river. In order to achieve their objectives, the clients had engaged a freelance project manager to undertake and manage the whole commission from start to finish. Kathrine Kirkevaag had never done anything like this before and so had to carry out considerable research into how best to organize such an undertaking. This involved setting up a jury consisting of

professional artists, the donors and members of the town council to select the shortlist and make the final decision; put out the initial advertisement inviting expressions of interest; organize the visits and agree terms for the artists; oversee the artist contract and organize the unveiling ceremony.

I have always maintained that art competitions should be adequately front loaded, by which I mean that a suitable percentage of the overall budget should be allocated to the proposal stage in order to attract quality submissions.

The generous terms for this competition included the following: the shortlisted artists were from the United States, Germany, Denmark, Norway and the UK. We were each given a fee of €10,000 plus travel and hotel expenses for two visits, the first visit to be briefed and the second to present proposals. I later went with my wife for another two night visit on the same terms in order to attend the announcement of the winner at a

Initial conceptual sketch of Vannpaviljong, William Pye FRBS, 2008

Stainless steel support structure for Vannpaviljong, William Pye FRBS and Benson-Sedgwick Engineering, UK, 2009

The opening of Vannpaviljong, Drammen, Norway, 2011

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press conference. It was then that I was told that the jury had unanimously chosen my proposal.

I also had the opportunity to view the other proposals which impressed me greatly. I felt that any one of them could have fulfilled the client’s objectives perfectly well.

In addition to a 1:20 scale stainless steel maquette, my proposal also included computer renderings and animated sequences which I was able to afford in view of the relatively generous fee.

The starting point in my search for an idea was to look for ways by which I might symbolize the different areas of the city of Drammen, which despite being separated by the river are drawn together into a single community by the bridge that links them. I appreciated that a prime motive for the client’s initiative was to bring a sense of unity to Drammen. Doodling with triangles, circles and squares produced something that I felt confident in developing, and from this a three dimensional composition emerged.

There then followed extensive negotiations over the separation of responsibilities between those undertaken by the main contract for the square and the scope of my own undertaking. Once this had been agreed, a contract was drawn up with a fixed price of £591,000. We opted to be paid in Sterling in order to avoid fluctuations in the value of the Euro during the contract period. This all took over a year to finalize.

Between 2009 and 2011 we completed detail design followed by construction drawings. When these were agreed manufacture proceeded. First the stainless steel support structure, followed by mirror polished cladding, and the translucent acrylic dome.

Delivery and installation constituted a project in itself.

The main sections were too large to be transported on a standard lorry, and had to be packed on the lowest low loader available, temporarily procured from Holland, with a road clearance of about 15cm. The consignment went by road and sea. All tunnels and bridges along the route in England and Norway had to be checked for height, one being only 4cm above the highest point of one of the pieces.

Installation and commissioning was completed in two weeks by six of us in May 2011. The team comprised Barry Goillau and Steve Burgess from Benson-Sedgwick Engineering, who engineer and manufacture my work; Tim Hewitt and David Lindsay from Artful Logistics, who pack and ship and help install my work; Robin Jeans, my main assistant, and me.

The unveiling took place on 18 June 2011. It had poured with rain all the day before and I was despondent that nobody would turn up. A cloudless sky greeted us next morning and, as I entered Strømsø Torg, I could hardly believe my eyes. Kathrine Kirkevaag had laid on quite a show. Many thousands had assembled to witness the occasion. A stage had been built for a full orchestra that performed a piece especially composed for the occasion. Speeches were delivered by the principal client Knut Smeby and myself. The unveiling was conducted by a beautifully disciplined troupe of girls and as the veil fell billowing to the ground a singer sang, dancers danced and the water began to flow.

Vannpaviljong is visible and eye-catching from afar and is something with which the public interact. It is not a building, but one can enter and pass through it, experiencing and enjoying the various effects from both inside and out: curtains of jets, rollwaving water covering the surfaces of mirror-polished stainless steel, and on top a double skinned transparent dome containing lively water activity. Inside, immediately under the dome, is one of my Starburst series, a circular feature at floor level that can be walked on. Water is jetted from below ground onto the underside of a circular piece of reinforced glass.

Since it has become the centre-piece of the major regeneration of Strømsø Torg in Drammen I am encouraged to learn that it continues to be enjoyed and appreciated by the people of Drammen passing by and through the square, many on their way to and from the railway station.

William Pye FRBS April 2014

Richard Wilson RASlipstream

Curated by Mark Davy, Futurecity, for Heathrow’s Terminal 2:

The Queen’s Terminal2010–2014

Slipstream by Richard Wilson at Heathrow’s Terminal 2: The Queen’s Terminal. Photographer David Levene. ©LHR Airports Limited.

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Slipstream“The whole project is almost a metaphor for the history of flight: I think I’m Orville Wright and I’m there with my quill and canvas – yet we’ve ended up in the cockpit of a jumbo jet.”

Richard Wilson, April 2014

The story of the commission for Terminal 2: Queen’s Terminal at Heathrow started early in 2010. Futurecity were invited to discuss ideas for the Covered Court, a space similar in size to the Tate Turbine Hall, envisaged as a grand architectural entranceway by architect Luis Vidal. The meeting at Heathrow involved discussions on placemaking and specifically the idea of a cultural gateway to London. For inspiration we looked to the success of Tate Modern and the Unilever Series where artists were invited to make large-scale interventions for the Turbine Hall. We were also interested in the 20 million passengers (per annum) that would access the new terminal, delivered by 23 Star Alliance airlines. Could we use the commission to attract a new audience for contemporary art?

From an initial long-list, five international artists, Sarah Tse, Sarah Morris, Tsatsuo Miyajima, Cerith Wyn Evans and Richard

Wilson were invited to propose a monumental artwork that could fill the void of the Covered Court. On the 8 December 2010 Wilson’s project team including CSI International and engineers Price and Meyers, crowded into the corporate meeting room, outnumbering the selection panel and spent most of the allocated time unpacking the numerous working models, pinning up drawings and laying out construction materials on every available surface until we were transported to a version of the artist’s studio.

Wilson’s winning proposal was Slipstream a form that followed the imagined flight path of a Zivko Edge 540, an advanced aerobatics aircraft made famous by Red Bull Air Race world champion Paul Bonhomme. Wilson brought the inventiveness and playfulness of his large-scale temporary works to the commission, communicated through dozens of drawings, photographs, collages and low-tech models of cardboard and wire. In Wilson’s proposal, the cutting-edge methods of design, engineering and fabrication required to realize Slipstream are tucked inside a sleek, undulating form. Wilson ingeniously takes the constituent parts of the flying machines that have fascinated us for over a century and fuses the physical, scientific and emotional in one endeavour, cleverly communicating our faith and trust in technology as well as the human touch required to get us to our destination.

Richard Wilson among component parts at CSi during a 2013 visit to view the pieces pre-transport to Heathrow ®Photographer Miyako Narita

Fabricators with a section of Slipstream under construction at CSi factory in Hull ®Photographer Marteen Kleinhout

The installation process, 2014 ®Photographer Steve Bates courtesy of LHR Airports Limited

Early drawing to define movement of an airplane in a single form, prior to Heathrow interview ©Richard Wilson RA

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Despite the scale and complexity of Slipstream, Wilson refused to devolve responsibility for construction entirely to the fabricator and engineer. Instead, he encouraged a collaborative process from the outset to find solutions that were both practical and visually stimulating. Slipstream’s intricate shape and weight meant the project had to be a model of collaboration and partnership from the outset. Every part required innovation and bespoke methods of fabrication, design and installation. Even the delivery of the 23 huge component sections required military planning as Slipstream was transported across six counties from the Hull-based manufacturing plant and smuggled into the terminal after dark across the main runway of one of the world’s busiest airports.

Slipstream is a brave public art commission, requiring substantial faith by the commissioning body (Heathrow) in Wilson’s ability to deliver his deceptively simple idea. I believe their trust in Richard has been rewarded. Slipstream, Wilson’s largest permanent work, gives Heathrow a distinctive narrative: travel is liberating, exhilarating and gravity defying and is the closest thing to magic for those of us who do not know how to build or fly a plane. Slipstream also provides amazing moments for the visitor to Covered Court; the awe inspiring ride on the escalator as the viewer rises diagonally upwards over 10 metres, along 78 metres of riveted aluminium under the undulating waves of the majestic roof. Then there is the panoramic view of the twisting, tumbling form of the sculpture greeting passengers as they leave the lifts at Arrivals and finally the startling reflection of Slipstream, a great leviathan slumbering in the deep green glass wall of the new terminal.

Mark Davy, Director of Futurecity and curator of the Covered Court Commission, Heathrow Terminal 2 April 2014

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