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| Chris Drury |
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The Heartbeat of the Earth I. Nature and the Human Presence ‘We ourselves are nature.’ Chris Drury What is it to be human? Each of us in our individual self constitutes a chemical process, a biological system, an organism in dynamic entropic interaction with the circumambient universe. Each of us embodies a consciousness of this fundamental material actuality. This sense of being in the world begins in simple sensations and ramifies into the thought, feeling and knowledge which, shared, defines us as social beings. Antecedent to that social and intellectual being, and concomitant with it as it develops, is the order of natural reality: the human organism is a term of the total ecosystem, a part of nature. Historically, humankind has experienced this natural reality at two interrelated levels. First, within the social microscosms of family, tribe and immediate environment, whether that of the smallest tribal groups in the most isolated and wild terrains or that of the city dweller, of whatever class, in the most technologically advanced industrialised cities. Second, as part of the natural macrocosm with its insistent repetitions, cycles and rhythms, the movements through the skies of sun, stars and moon, the seasons, their tides and weathers, day and night, light and darkness, birth, copulation and death in the animal kingdom, the cyclic regeneration, growth, flowering and decay of things in the vegetable world, the observable lithogenesis, movement and transformations of the mineral earth. At times and places in human history the congruence of these two realities has been felt and understood, and assimilated at the deepest levels into the organisation and production of cultures. Especially this has been true in societies that live in close proximity to the sources of their material well-being, with a heightened daily awareness of their coexistence with the natural world and of the ineluctable interdependence of living things within it. In other times and circumstances, however, family, tribe and civilisation have been conceived as mechanisms of defence against the alien and separate chaos of nature, seen at worst as a reality essentially and intrinsically hostile to human life, at best as merely mechanical and passive. This latter view, in the advanced form of a fatal scientific dualism, has been ascendant in the increasingly industrial nations for the nearly four hundred years since it was definitively philosophised by Descartes. Acting upon this philosophy and in pursuit of increased human wealth and power, some of the brightest and bravest of every generation have set out to explore, map, subdue and exploit a disorderly or soulless nature to purely human purposes - to confirm man as ‘the master of all he surveys’, and to utilise the resources of earth without regard to their finitude. In recent years Chris Drury is among foremost of those artists who have realised that the human organism, and the social systems that sustain human culture in every sense of that word, and which are served by instrumental science and technology, constitute a reality continuous with the wider ecosystem of the earth as a whole; the human and the natural are not separable each from the other, but are each part of the other. Drury also understands that the disinterested science which creates images of nature and seeks to understand the interconnections between every part of the living cosmos is in itself a great work of art: scientific reality is itself an aspect of that greater reality defined by a unitary human intelligence and manifest in human artifice, ‘that which is made with wisdom and skill’. Art and Science alike are components of the common pursuit of a true understanding of what it is to be human: both are historical, their meanings determined, developed and changed in cultural exchange; they are at once collaborative modes of research and complex forms of knowledge. In this deep sense, science and art are one, and the cultural construction of a complex idea of ‘nature’, the specifically human consciousness of an external reality separable from human experience, of a ‘nature’ separable, that is, from ‘human nature’, is itself natural. ‘Our analysis is part of the process of nature’ writes Drury: ‘The process of nature must include the actions of man whether or not they are destructive.’ Following in paths of modernist thinking first tracked in the work of Klee and Gabo, and along with some of the best and most interesting artists of his time – Josef Beuys, herman de vries, Richard Long, Giuseppe Penone, Hamish Fulton, Andy Goldsworthy, Ian Hamilton Finlay and Susan Derges among others – Drury has set out to make work whose primary purpose has been to increase our knowledge and heighten our awareness of that dynamic ‘continuous reality’ of culture and nature, and to celebrate it. He has stated this with simplicity and admirable clarity: ‘Man’s description of “nature” as something separate … where the edge is the division between “nature” and “culture”, is an illusion. ‘”Nature” and “culture” are the same thing. There is no division.’ The new art of nature – that movement in art to which Drury’s work belongs - opposes to an objective seeing of things ‘out there’ a subjective being within nature, in which observation itself is understood as part of the phenomenological actuality of what Heidegger termed ‘being-in-the-world’. In the Cartesian view, the eye is conceived as a window between the primary reality of the mind and the secondary reality of the external world: ‘… finally,’ wrote Descartes, ‘I should deal with man because he is the spectator of all.’ (This explains the importance of optics to Renaissance physicists such as Galileo and Newton, and of perspective and the camera obscura to Renaissance artists). Thus the traditional, artful perspectives of viewing, abstracting and framing are based on the idea of ‘observing’ of a world which is essentially separate from the surveying spectator. Artists of the kind I have mentioned, on the other hand, found themselves developing a variety of very different creative strategies in order to be truthful to their experience of what Gaston Bachelard, the French philosopher whose Poetics of Space was highly influential on their generation, called ‘life in the round’. The crucial and radical notion that first took hold in the so-called ‘conceptual’ work of the ‘60s and early ‘70s was that an art whose primary focus was on nature – that term being understood strictly in the terms defined above - might be made by actions within situations at specific times - walking, gathering, collecting and arraying found objects, displacing or arranging objects and without harm to their locations, constructing inconspicuous landscape works or sanctuaries for plant and animal life, memorialising actual experiences in words, recorded sounds, photographs and photograms, building temporary and disposable shelters and monuments, constructing evocative objects for viewing within galleries, etc. Their diverse art is not descriptive but refractive, it is a kind of prism through which the light of phenomenological reality itself might be the more sharply defined and intensified. ‘If you’re a painter of nature, in order to paint it you have to subtract yourself from it’, Drury has said. ‘You have to stand back and view it, or view the angle. And you take yourself out of it, really, in order to view it. The difference is that since the ‘60s artists have been putting themselves into it.’ In a thirty year career that has been highly productive and varied, Drury has found many ways of putting himself into it, so to speak; he has, in fact, used most of the strategies I have mentioned, always working with an acute sensitivity to place and to site, and to their natural contexts and cultural histories, recognising always the logic of a cultural-natural continuum. He has walked in places remote and familiar, aware at all times of the presence (or absence) of people who might be native to the place, or who are passers-by or visitors from elsewhere, and always alive to time, tides and seasons; he collects and constructs, records and recalls; and in a manner unusual to his contemporary artists in the field, his interventions and constructions have usually, in one way or another, incorporated elements from particular material cultures, or purposively imitated human artefacts, vessels, cabins and monuments. ‘Drury’s shelters, baskets and kayaks,’ I wrote once, ‘are poetic constructs: they propose that all humankind makes its perilous journey through time and space by the exercise of the imagination on the materials that nature provides.’ These propositions are made in emblematic terms: the art object that imitates a useful thing is by definition exemplary, a salutary reminder of material and instrumental necessity. Drury’s beautiful medicine wheels and circular spore-print-centred mushroom text-drawings, in which an ancient cosmic motif incorporates randomly found natural objects or chant-like repetitive texts written in a miniature hand, eloquently identify the signifying actions of the artist with manifestations of biological cycles and recurrences. His shelters, vessels, boats, bundles and baskets are reminders of the simplicity and ingenuity of maintaining subsistence down at earth, close by water, beneath the over-arching sky. His cloud and tide chambers, using camera obscura apertures, and sometimes low-tech mirror and lens apparatus, have something of the function of observatories, but emotively intensifying the visual experience of evanescent natural phenomena by bringing light, sights and sounds from outside to inside. His cairns and fire monuments are memorials to passing presence, their contained fires an elemental analogy for the transient breath of their builder; they are also hearths, stoves, and beacons. His earth works and spirals recall ancient forts, protected places and burial grounds. Wherever on earth he has walked and worked, Drury has always been conscious of the sediments of an ever-changing interrelated human and natural history, the always present traces of human habitation and cultural presence, signs and objects, tracks and trails, the evidences of agricultural and industrial settlement, and of the ever-present course of a river, the daily shadow of a mountain, the slope of hill, flow of water and fall of rock. His art has always taken its bearings from these simultaneities of distant and near past with the visible, tangible, audible actualities of the living present: the limestone outcrop and the peat bog, the ancient incised ritual stone, a scattered pile of slate-mine detritus; this morning’s lapwing feather and sheep’s dropping, birdcalls and waterfall, mushrooms, a cast ram’s horn, a coppiced wood. II Soundings from Antarctica ‘Anyone staying at Sky Blu has to help load and unload planes, refuel them and keep the runway free of snow, even if it takes all night. Then you can go and make art.’ Chris Drury In early 2007 Drury went for two months to Antarctica: he had decided he wanted to go to the ultimate place. The question was open: what, as an artist, could he, or would he, make of it? Drury went to Antarctica as an explorer and creative adventurer, to discover what his art – concerned as it is with aspects of human survival and of social and natural identity - might discover in such a place. He found there, as he must have expected, a land where those interconnected cultural and natural deposits which had hitherto provided the materials of his art were non-existent, this was, instead, a desert place without the footprints and traces of a human history. We may think that has changed since the beginning of the last century: but the traces of man, from the days of Shackleton, Amundson and Scott to the current scientific outposts of the British Antarctic Survey, are as yet really nothing in that vast fastness. What there is of human culture is carried there from elsewhere, in the speculative constructs of weather and mineral scientists, in the high-tech apparatus with which they conduct their investigations, in the tackle and gear that keeps them alive, and in the ideas, customs and artefacts they take with them. It is a place, Drury has said, where human beings should not be: it is no country for men of any age. But for the artist it was strangely exhilarating: ‘I wanted the absolute emptiness of the place.’ The immediate, and then the long-term, challenge was to conceive of what kind of work he might make in response to such a place. But at first, astonished, he did very little but contemplate the emptiness of the space around him, and take deep delight in its elemental beauty, the unimaginable distances between the tiny scientific camps and stations, the endless vistas of blue-white, the way in which the ever-present ice crystals in the air became a flickering gold dust in the sunlight, the desert stars at night. ‘The landscape of the interior of Antarctica is absolute. It is so all all-encompassing and beautiful it can reduce you to tears…. Whenever I think back to that time, my heart misses a beat and tears come to my eyes…. Looking out on that ethereal space it was very clear to me that this was an untouched and untouchable land. Both empty and full at the same time; complete in itself.’ In going to Antarctica, Drury was acting on his instinct (correctly as it turned out) that the experience of this most extreme place on the surface of the earth would in some way enter deeply into his intuitions of an absolute connection of the inner energies and forms of the body to those that govern ultimate systems: ‘[my experience there] could act as a kind of bench mark of the macrocosm to which I could compare and link my findings in the microcosm: flow patterns and processes in the body… I needed this experience to enter my very bones; to act as a baseline for further research.’ Back at home in the studio it needed sustained reflection to bring conceptual and artistic coherence to this experience. Writing months later he reflected on this process: ‘I have tried to find ways of talking about the absolute nothingness of various experiences deep in Antarctica. In a sense this nothingness contains everything.’ Working with the scientists of the BAS he came to realise, also, that the vast stillness of the ice is itself is an illusion: the ice is never static; being itself the outcome of a configuration of watersheds, the ice cap is in constant flux, its glaciers always moving. Indeed it is the movement of these huge masses, the ice deposits of 900,000 years - roughly the time that man has walked on earth - that is the focus of a great deal of the scientific survey in Antarctica, and the echograms that are the means to this study were to become the basis of some of the most beautiful and moving work in this exhibition. The Antarctic ice, laid down on to the continental landmass over eons of precipitation, contains information available nowhere else, it is the earth’s greatest weather archive, the earth’s most reliable thermometer, and its existence and its nature make it the cradle - ‘endlessly rocking’ - of the earth’s present climate, the fount and origin of its weather systems. When the weather changes in Antarctica we feel it here, just as effects are felt by every tree in the Amazon forests, and every great whale as it makes its passage from one ocean to another. The conditions that govern its vast circumpolar ocean, its changes of temperature and current, affect those of every sea on earth, and make the Antarctic seas themselves a huge resource for the sustaining of marine life. The life of the entire planet, it might be said, revolves around these interconnected systems of land, ice and sea, the rhythmically flowing and frozen, watery ‘nothingness that contains everything.’ Sounding the ice, studying its layers by means of ice-cores, measuring its endless movement: these activities are at the centre of the scientific study of climate change: and there has never been a time in all human history when the quality of our understanding of our condition in nature – which is the condition of our historical being in the world - has been more crucial to our survival as a species, and to the survival of all the other species, animal and vegetable, in the complex network of terrestrial interdependence. It was in this respect that Drury found in the Antarctic a vital continuity with the work made in other, more humanly congenial, places, work whose central concern has been with the vital connection of the humanly cultural with the humanly natural. At the heart of that concern has been a primary desideratum: that our natural condition is biological, and that the body itself is a micro-system in which may be traced correspondences and analogies with all other dynamic systems, including those of the weather systems of the earth, and ultimately the recurrent and inevitable patterns of macrocosmic solar systems and galaxies. Thus the vortex and double vortex forms that have been a thematic preoccupation of his for many years occur, as he has indicated, in the smallest and the largest known systems, and over the most diverse time-scales. An earlier work, Edge of Chaos (2000), for example, had placed side-by-side a writing-drawing based on a section of the human heart and a similar drawing based on a section through an ancient redwood tree; in both there can be discerned the pattern of the double vortex. Drury’s work from Antarctica can be divided into two groups. The first consists in spectacularly beautiful photographs of the landscape itself, and of evocative, necessarily temporary, interventions made in the landscape by the artist. These latter inevitably recall earlier works, reprising (not without a hint of irony) familiar motifs and actions, knowing that the extreme conditions will almost immediately efface them. To draw the ancient signs that register human presence – the fingerprint (in Iceprints), the double vortex (in Wind Vortex) -, to be ‘visible in the surface snow for at most a day’ - was, says Drury, ‘like pissing in the wind’. In Ice Void we look down into a small hole in the ice, only inches deep, which, as if it were bottomless, simultaneously emanates darkness and absorbs light. Cloud Igloo reverses this: we look upwards to light through radiant ice, and, beyond the opening, clouds in the sky: standing on water miles deep, in the trace of a timeless and never-to-be-repeated instant, we look through blue water and air to see water floating by. The second group of works have been made in the studio over the last few months, using imagery made available by scientists working with the Antarctic Survey. Their imagery derives from Global Positioning Systems (GPS), meteorological wind tracking devices, satellite imagery and echogram imaging of the ice cap made by equipment carried on low-flying aircraft above the ice. Most of this imagery is machine and computer generated; it presents us not with what is naturally seen and heard so much as with a conceptual representation of what is beyond human sensing. Since any such representation of ‘the flow patterns and processes of the body’ (including X-ray, photographic and audio and video imagery) is likewise programmatically abstract, its graphic outputs correspond closely to the forms of those of planetary survey. Drury’s potent analogies of microcosm and macrocosm find vivid expression in these correspondences. The works in this group take the form of graphic modifications of the printout imagery of the scientific surveys: in Everything nothing and Explorers at the Edge of the Void, strata of finely handwritten words follow the strata lines of echograms; Above and Below Carrara Nunatac vertically juxtaposes a photograph of surface, sky and horizon to an echogram image that suggests the depth of the ice cap below; Under the Ice, above the Unknown combines those elements; in Double Echo and Lake Concordia the echogram visualises the ice layers above the surface configurations of the land below, and thus provides a measure of its lateral movement through time, just as the superimposed graph of the cardio-echogram charts the temporal pattern of the pilot’s living heartbeat. These graphic soundings of the polar ice, with their superimposed calligraphies and other additions, are indeed – as Drury has observed - ‘drawings of the heartbeat of the earth’. His art asks us to listen, and to act upon our sense of wonder that the rhythms, repetitions and patterns of life exist within us and without us. Mel Gooding Notes: Quotations from Chris Drury are from the artist’s blog written during the period of his work relating to Antarctica. For a historical and critical account of ‘the new art of nature’ see Song of the Earth: European Artists and the Landscape by Mel Gooding, with interviews of artists (including Chris Drury) by William Furlong (Thames and Hudson, London, 2002). See also Chris Drury: Silent Spaces (Thames and Hudson, London, 2004). |
Biography 1948 Born in Colombo, Sri Lanka 1966-70Camberwell School of Art: Sculpture Selected Solo Exhibitions 2008 Chris Drury: Antarctica, A Heartbeat of the Earth – Beaux Arts, London 2006 Chris Drury – ‘Inside out, Outside In’: Vanderbilt University art gallery, Nashville, Tennessee, USA 2005 'Chris Drury' Villa Montalvo, California: installations in the gallery and outside in the redwoods. 2004 'Heart of Stone' Oriel Mostyn, Llandudno , Wales, Stephen Lacey Gallery, London 2003 'Heart of Stone' Aberystwyth Art Gallery 2002 ‘Chris Drury’ De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill 2000 'Journeys on Paper', Stephen Lacey Gallery, London 1999 'Shelter': installation. Fabrica, Brighton 1998 'Silent Spaces', Janus Avivson Gallery, New York. USA 1995 'Vessel', travelling exhibition, Arts Council of England, South East Arts & Arts Scottish Arts Council. Towner Art Gallery. Rochdale Art Gallery. Royal Botanic Gardens, Edinburgh 1993 'Stones and Bundles': installations and other works in the gallery. Rebecca Hossack Gallery, London. Cloud chamber and covered cairn in the Sculpture Garden of St. James', Piccadilly 1991-92 'Adharc': Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin 1990-91 'Chris Drury' Ace Gallery, Los Angeles, USA 1989 'Chris Drury' Prema Gallery and Cairn Gallery, Gloucestershire 1987 'Shelters and Baskets': travelling exhibition organised by the Orchard Gallery, Derry, in association with the Henry Moore Centre for the Study of Sculpture, Leeds City Art Gallery, traveling to: Foyle Gallery, Derry. Powers Court Craft Gallery, Dublin. Limerick Art Gallery. Leeds City Art Gallery. Street Level, Glasgow. Seagate Gallery, Dundee. Peacock Artspace, Aberdeen. Royal Botanic Gardens, Edinburgh 1985 'Medicine Wheel': Coracle Gallery, London Selected Group Exhibitions 2005 'Vinyl' Cork City- City of Culture 2005 - curated by Coracle 2004 'Eco photo Show' Dorsky Gallery, long Island City, New York, USA 2004-05 'In praise of Earth' Salisbury Festival 2003 'The Common Thread ' Finding Fiber in Contemporary Art, Westport Arts Center, Westport, USA 2003 In Praise Of Trees - Salisbury Festival and Stephen Lacey Gallery in collaboration with English Nature 2001-02 From Across The Pond Browngrotta Arts, Connecticut, USA 2000 Low Reach, High tech - Refusalon Gallery, San Francisco, USA 1999 Chris Drury & Herman de Vries , Refusalon Gallery, San Francisco, USA 1998-99 'European Art Nature Triennial. Odsherreds, Kuntsmuseum, Denmark. Documentary work of the Art Nature Sculpture Project at Dragsholm Castle by seven European artists 1996 'The Edge of Town': Joseloff Gallery, Hartford, Connecticut, USA. British and American artists exploring the area between urban and 'natural' landscapes. A commissioned site specific work outside and work inside. 1993 'Different Natures': a survey exhibition of Art in Nature worldwide since 1960. La Defense Galleries, Paris, Barcelona 1990 'Beelden Buiten': Tielt, Belgium. Biannual exhibition. Five British, Five Belgian artists. 1989 'Distant Echoes', Chris Drury and Aase Goldsmith: Scottish Arts Council Traveling Gallery: Orkneys, Shetlands, Hebrides 1989 'Art and Nature', Dundee Art Gallery 1987 'Unpainted Landscapes', Victoria Miro Gallery, London. 1986 'Land', Victoria Miro Gallery, London 1985 'Second Nature', Newlyn Orion Gallery, Penzance 1984 'Salon D'Automne', Serpentine Gallery, London Commissioned Site-Specific Works 2006 'Fingermaze' Hove Park. 2005 ‘Redwood Vortex ’ Villa Montalvo, California, USA 2004 ' Rivers of Stone' and 'Fingerprint' Russells Hall Hospital, Dudley 2003 ‘Cloud Chamber for the trees and Sky ’ North Carolina Museum of Art, USA 2002 ‘Time Capsule’ South Carolina Botanic Garden Sculpture Program, USA 2001 'Yew Spheres' Ickworth House, Suffolk 1998 'Tree Vortex', Dragsholm Castle, Odsherred, Denmark 1997 'Hut of the Shadow', Lochmaddy, North Uist, Western Isles 1996 'Cedar Log Sky Chamber', Okawa Village, Kochi, Japan 1995 'Chalk Vessel', Towner Art Gallery 1994 'Tree / Mountain Shelter', Arte Sella, Sella Valley, Italy 1993 'Covered Cairn', Tickon, Langeland, Denmark Public Collections Victoria & Albert Museum, London Recent Awards 2004 University College London 'Art in Health Award' for work on systems in the body and systems on the planet. 1998 Commendation, Annual Awards of the Association for the protection of Rural Scotland, for 'Hut of the Shadow'. 1997 Natures Prize: Scottish Environmental Award for 'Hut of the Shadow'. 1995-96 Pollock-Krasner Award. Residencies 2008 For-site Residency – California / Nevada 2006 British Antarctic Survey ‘Artists and Writers in Antarctica Fellowship’ 2005 Artists Residency Program, Villa Montalvo, Saratoga, California 2000 Year Of The Artist Residency – Conquest Hospital, Hastings. Publications 2007 LAND ART, Ben Tufnell – Tate Publishing, ISBN 1-85437-604-7 2006 NATURAL ARCHITECTURE, Alessandro Rocca – 22 Publishing, ISBN 88-95185-01-3 2005 'Modern British Sculpture' - Guy Portelli, Shiffer Publishing. ISBN: 0-7643-2111-0 2004 'Silent spaces' - Thames & Hudson 2004 'Art Nature Dialogues' - Interviews with environmental, State University of New York 2004 'Ecological Aesthetics' - Birkhauser - in English and German - initiated by Herman Prigann in cooperation with Vera David, edited by Heike Strelow. ISBN 3-7643-2424 (English) 3- 7643-2423-6 (German) 2003 'Images of Earth and spirit'- a Resurgence Art Anthology Ltd, edited by John lane and Satish Kumar - Green Books ISBN 0-903998-29-8 'Defying Gravity' Exhibition catalogue, for survey exhibition, North Carolina Museum Art 2002 Song Of The Earth’ European artists and The Landscape, Herman de Vries, Chris Drury, Nikolaus Lang, Richard Long and Guiseppe Penone. Essay by Mel Gooding, interviews by William Furlong. Thames & Hudson ISBN 0-500- 51016-4, Published in America by Abrams as ‘Artists. Land. Nature’ Chris Drury exhibition catalogue De La Warr Pavilion 2001 ' Nature, Art ' - Gilles A. Tiberghein, Actes Sud - ISBN 2-7427-2849 2000 ' From across The Pond ' Browngrotta Arts 1999 'Journeys on Paper' - Chris Drury, Stephen Lacey Gallery, London. 1998 'Chris Drury - Silent Spaces', Thames & Hudson, ISBN 0500 09276-1. A 120-page monograph with over 150 illustrations on the last twenty years of work. Introduction by Kay Syrad 1996 'Art in nature', Mazzotta. 1995 'Vessel'- Chris Drury', Towner Art Gallery, Eastbourne and Royal Botanic Gardens, Edinburgh 1994 'Different Natures - Visions de l'Art Contemporain', 1993 Tickon - Catalogue 1990 'Bogland', Bogland Symposium Exhibition Catalogue, Belfast & Dublin. 1988 'Shelters and Baskets' - Chris Drury, Orchard Gallery. 1987 'The Unpainted Landscape', Scottish Arts Council and Coracle Press. 1986 'Landscape', Kettle's Yard, Cambridge. 1984 'Assemble Here', for Puck Building, New York, Coracle Press.
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