Andy Harper and Abigail Reynolds on 'Assembly' in St Just

Interview Rupert White

Probably the easiest way to introduce yourselves to readers is initially by talking about your activity as artists. Andy you are in 'Curious Nature' currently at the Newlyn, where your paintings have a very powerful presence. How long have you been painting in this distinctive style, how did the technique evolve and how does it relate to your earlier paintings?

I have been working in this way since around May/June 2004 but the basic premise of how they are made goes back to a much earlier series I was working on in the 90s, namely the 'grass paintings'. This earlier series was a simple play between a pre-meditated process of painting (the repeated single brush stroke) and the resulting representational image of a field of grass. However, by the year 2000 and some sixty grass paintings later, I had painted myself into a tight conceptual corner and was unsure how to escape. It took around four years of working in a very different way and with no form of representation, before I felt comfortable to return to the series and work out how I might re-invent the series. From then on, it is as though weeds just started to push up through the grass, growing wilder and wilder until they reached the level of complexity and strangeness that the paintings now contain (eg 'Luminous Ash' 2007 (above)).

Abigail, I would guess you describe yourself as a sculptor, but there is a strong conceptual underpinning to your work in the sense that the objects illustrate conceptual relationships as well as spatial relationships. Could you explain the concept underlying a substantial work like Mount Fear, for example?

I'm very interested in the possibility of visual decisions in art works being partially driven by some other factor than aesthetic. An aesthetic of necessity or mapping is an obvious feature of my works. There are also continuing threads of factuality and landscape/cityscape across the range of my works.

'Mount Fear' (left: Mount Fear East London) is a terrain generated by data sets relating to the frequency and position of urban crimes. Precise statistics are provided by the police. Each individual incident adds to the height of the model, forming a mountain. The contours of this sculptural mountain are determined not by aesthetics but by the crime rates in each area mapped. The imaginative fantasy space seemingly proposed by the sculpture is thereby subverted by the hard facts and logic of the criteria that shape it. The object does not describe an ideal other-worldly space separated from lived reality, but conversely describes in relentless detail the actuality of life on the city streets.

'The Universal Now' (below right) takes it's title from debates about time continuum in quantum physics. I collect second hand books and when I find two photographs (usually of a famous building) that have been printed at similar scale, taken from a similar view point, I cut and fold them into a new single surface.  The finished work then contains both images in their entirety. The act of doing this to the book plates pushes them out into three dimensions in a bulging time ruffle. This is a sort of resurrection of the forgotten book plate and the forgotten photographers that have stood in the space space but at different times. The 'Universal Now' works bring these moments into a dialogue.

The paper sections that I scalpel out must tile the plane and also fold up symmetrically. The 'pattern' is therefore anything but arbitrary and the choice of image is also prescribed by the system.
 

I have a sense that you have both been in London for a few years now, and are, to a degree ensconced in the scene in the area, both through your studio activity, involvement with galleries in the capital, and involvement with teaching. Can you just sketch this out a little?

As we both studied at London-based art schools at different times in the past fifteen years or so, our resources in terms of the people we know and the spaces that we rely on have been very London-centric.  We met at Braziers International (a residential artists workshop in Oxfordshire) in 2000, so we have always shared a belief in artists getting out of the habitual studio environment in order to push on aspects of the work they are making. Though we have very different practices we both feel a huge benefit in working outside London on occasion.

Having lived and worked in London for years, we increasingly felt that being there constantly gobbles up time with distractions, and is often unproductive. We thought that although we work at teaching institutions in London (Goldsmiths) and Oxford (The Ruskin School) and we still rely financially upon those structures, we don't need to be there much of the time. All these thoughts and discussions suddenly crystallised into the idea of Assembly (below left) which would allow both ourselves and other artists to spend periods of time in Cornwall at any time of the year.

So it can provide live/work space, and eg seminar space both for yourselves and potentially for others to make use of...

Two years ago property prices were already very high so felt very lucky to find the building that now houses Assembly. It's perfect because it's not isolated, being in the centre of a busy town with lots of amenities, and is a very flexible, light, large space. We have changed it enormously since buying it - not only putting on a new roof and other essential things but also remodelling the interior. We ended up doing this ourselves in snatches, as it's a very simple building, just a shell really with a wooden mezzanine. We just tried not to do anything fussy - just to do the obvious, and leave the space to be what it is.

In general terms what else is attractive about Cornwall? What sense have you of the art community and art practice down here?

There's something great about travelling as far as you can get before falling into the sea, which is a part of being here, but of course we are specifically here because there's already a lot of art happening - between the Tate, Newlyn and the various artist-run organisations, and so we can just add to it rather than feel as though we are starting from zero. We are really happy to find that art debates here are as lively as in London and with a similar sharpness and criticality - perhaps more as it's a less commercial scene.

Also, so many artists internationally as well as nationally are drawn to Cornwall - whether it's simply the ruggedness of the cliffs and the feeling of isolation, or the ancient spiritual sites, or the post-industrial landscape of the mines, or an interest in DH Lawrence or the St Ives modernist movement...and for us it's probably all of that and then more. At the moment we spend slightly less than six moths of the year here and we haven't considered whether we'll entirely be based here at some point - we'll see how it goes.

 RW 8/5/08

Go to www.abigailreynolds.com or www.andyh.net for more info. From either site you can navigate through to more information about Assembly in St Just.