Fabrication
Summer 2021
The practicalities of how artists approach making sculpture, and their relationship with skilled fabricators, has often been shrouded in mystery.
We examine the blurred lines between art, craft and industry, revealing how sculptors realise their vision through collaboration and exchange.
About this season
This Research Season makes visible rarely-acknowledged ways in which sculptors, in both historical and contemporary contexts, collaborate with skilled fabricators to bring their projects to fruition. It also examines ways in which making sculpture has changed, particularly in light of the coronavirus pandemic.
This Research Season has been organised in collaboration with Pangaea Sculptors’ Centre and the Universities of Leeds, York and Sheffield.
Fabrication as a Career
Roundtable discussion with artists Simeon Barclay & Karin Ruggaber and fabricators Rui Pignatelli & Nigel Schofield, Wednesday 21 April 2021.
Artists Simeon Barclay, Professor Karin Ruggaber (University College London) and fabricators Rui Pignatelli (Pangaea Sculptors’ Centre) and Nigel Schofield (MDM Props) join us for a live roundtable discussion on the professional relationship between sculpture and fabrication.
The speakers explore issues regarding the teaching of fabrication in art schools, access to fabrication facilities and how knowledge of fabrication may inform sculptural practice. This is followed by discussion and questions from the audience.
About the speakers
Simeon Barclay
Simeon Barclay
Simeon Barclay (b. 1975, Huddersfield) is an artist whose practice draws upon a rich vein of popular culture to make works that activate complex cultural histories whilst addressing the complexity of memory, inheritance, aspiration and desire.
Barclay received his BA from Leeds Metropolitan University, Leeds in 2010 and an MFA from Goldsmiths College, London in 2014. He has exhibited both nationally and internationally including at Southbank Centre, London; Tate Britain, London; South London Gallery; Liverpool Biennial; Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Newcastle; Workplace Foundation, Gateshead; Holden Gallery, Manchester; The Tetley, Leeds; Cubitt Gallery, London; The Bluecoat, Liverpool; Jerwood Space, London; Galerie Lisa Kandlhofer, Vienna; Rodolphe Janssen, Brussels; Arcadia Missa, New York; and W139, Amsterdam. Simeon lives and works in Leeds.
Rui Pignatelli
Rui Pignatelli
Rui Pignatelli graduated with a Licentiate degree in Sculpture from the Fine Arts University of Lisbon. Soon after he started running an artist residency space (IPAI), producing national young artists events and taking part in the production of two editions of the Biennial of Young Artists from Europe and the Mediterranean (BJCEM). He moved to London in 2007 to pursue his studies with an MA Fine Art at Central Saint Martins.
His background in sculpture and passion for making led him to start what is now a decade long career as an art fabricator. He works with artists in all stages of their careers, sometimes as a solo fabricatior, and sometimes as part of a fabrication team, always with joy for innovation and experimentation. Rui is now also a videographer and a maverick drone pilot.
Karin Ruggaber
Karin Ruggaber
Karin Ruggaber is Professor of Fine Art at the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL, and Head of Graduate Sculpture. A practicing artist, she makes sculpture as well as producing artist’s books.
Coming out of a studio-based practice, her work uses aspects of figuration and ornamentation. She is interested in the translation of pictorial principles into sculpture, and how imaginary space materialises within sculptural language and public space.
Karin Ruggaber has held solo exhibitions at greengrassi, London; Walter Knoll, London; PEER, London; Art Now, Tate Britain, London; and group exhibitions at La Casa Encendida, Madrid; CCA, Andratx; MUDAM, Luxembourg; Museo Marino Marini, Florence; Artists Space, New York; Camden Arts Centre, London; and Bloomberg SPACE, London. Her work was included in British Art Show 7 at Nottingham Contemporary and Hayward Gallery, London (2010).
She was recently commissioned by Selldorf Architects for a permanent wall relief for 21 E 12 Greenwich Village, New York. She was recipient of an Abbey Fellowship Award at the British School, Rome in 2019.
Nigel Schofield
Nigel Schofield
Nigel Schofieldholds a BA degree in 3-Dimensional Design and further qualifications specialising in wood, metal and plastics. Having worked in the creative construction industries for over thirty years, his career began as an artist/model maker/builder working in theatre, film, TV and the art world.
After several years’ experience he joined the fledgling company MDM and helped build it into the company it is today. MDM celebrated their 25th anniversary in 2019.
In the 1990s he worked with several young British artists to bring their ideas to life; this led to him concentrating on the art world and specifically sculpture as a chosen field. This continues to this day. He has continued to help and develop younger artists as well as working with some of the world’s most established artists. Notable clients include: Damien Hirst, Anselm Kiefer, Anish Kapoor, Yayoi Kusama, Marina Abramovic, Tracey Emin and Anthony Gormley. Institutions he has worked with include The British Museum and The National Gallery.
Engaging Technologies / Emerging Technologies
Roundtable discussion with artists Alice Channer, Zachary Eastwood-Bloom and Daniel Steegman Mangrané, Wednesday 26 May 2021.
Artists Alice Channer, Zachary Eastwood-Bloom and Daniel Steegman Mangrané join us for a live roundtable discussion about the use of new and emerging technologies in sculptural production.
The speakers explore the use of new technologies in their own sculptural practice, followed by discussion and questions from the audience.
About the speakers
Alice Channer
Alice Channer
Alice Channer (b. 1977, Oxford) lives and works in the edges of London. She uses sculpture, in its broadest possible definition, to stretch out, slow down and speed up industrial, post-industrial and ‘natural’ production processes. Her work is a twenty first century Process Art. Channer aims to make these processes more visible to herself and to others, and to attune us to the multiple embodiments and disembodiments involved.
Using materials ranging from spider crab shells and stainless steel to limestone, pelletized and recycled plastic and pleated silk, her work traces the disappearance, mutation and possible evolution of multiple bodies in post-industrial environments.
Channer has exhibited widely over the last fifteen years, including institutional exhibitions at: Marta Herford, Germany; Oberösterreichische Landesmuseen, Austria; Yorkshire Sculpture Park, New Art Gallery Walsall (2021); Tate Britain, London; Towner Gallery, Eastbourne (2019); Museum Morsbroich, Germany; Whitechapel Gallery, London; Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge; La Panacée MoCo, Montpellier (2018); Aspen Art Museum, Colorado and Kunsthaus Hamburg, Germany (2017); Museum Kurhaus Kleve, Germany; Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester (2016); Aïshti Foundation, Beirut; Public Art Fund, New York; Aspen Art Museum, Colorado (2015); Fridericianum, Kassel; Kestnergesellschaft, Hannover and Künstlerhaus Graz, Austria (2014); The Hepworth Wakefield, the 55th Venice Biennale, and Kunstverein Freiburg, Germany ( 2013); South London Gallery and Tate Britain (2012).
In 2021, Channer will make her first monumental permanent public sculpture commission, Nanowires, for the Engineering Department of the University of the West of England. For this commission, the artist is working with bioengineers at the university to identify organic forms whose bodies will influence her sculpture. In 2021 she will also present a group of works as part of Liverpool Biennial 2021: The Stomach and the Port (curated by Manuela Moscoso), and a new outdoor large scale interactive sculpture as part of High Desert Test Sites 2021, USA (curated by Iwona Blazwick). Additionally, she will present an outdoor sculpture Burial as part of Sculpture In The City, London, amongst numerous other solo and group exhibitions. Alice Channer is represented by Konrad Fischer Galerie, Berlin and Düsseldorf.
Zachary Eastwood-Bloom
Zachary Eastwood-Bloom
Zachary Eastwood-Bloom uses sculpture, video, dance, sound, photography and drawings to explore the notion of human progress in relation to historical ideas, scientific development and digital technology, as well as the ways in which humans attempt to understand the world around them, using methods such as storytelling, religion, science, or technology.
Zachary originally studied Ceramics at Edinburgh College of Art, before going to London to earn his Masters degree in Ceramics and Glass at the Royal College of Art (RCA). While studying at the RCA, he began to explore the use of digital technologies in relation to a broad range of materials. This marked a shift in Zachary’s practice, in which he began using digital technologies in combination with sculpture and drawing.
Most recently Zachary has been an Artist in Residence at the Scottish Ballet, where he collaborated with choreographers, musicians, and dancers to create three short film works, motion-tracking dancers and digitally generating visual effects. Each of these performances is based on stories from Classical Greek mythology.
Currently Zachary is engaged in the research and development phase of two new bodies of work: one that explores the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning in sculptural aesthetics, and one that experiments with new and hybrid presentation and performance formats for motion-capture data.
Zachary has exhibited widely in the UK and across Europe, including at the V&A, Royal Academy of Art, Jerwood Visual Arts, and the British Crafts Council.
Daniel Steegmann Mangrané
Daniel Steegmann Mangrané
Daniel Steegmann Mangrané was born in Barcelona in 1977 and since 2004 has lived in Rio de Janeiro. His research is particularly interested in biological processes and anthropological discourses, which he uses as inspiration to create works that confuse the traditional separations between culture and nature, subjects and objects, reality and dreams, visible and invisible, corporeal and incorporeal … dissolving them into relationships of mutual transformation.
In recent years Daniel Steegmann Mangrané has shown his work in museums and biennials around the world, among the most recent being the Taipei Biennial, Pirelli Hangar Bicocca, Berlin Biennial, Serralves Museum, Institut d’art Contemporain Villeurbanne, Nottingham Contemporary, CCS Bard and the São Paulo Biennial.
His works are found in the permanent collections of the Tate, Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro, Inhotim, Serralves Museum, Walker Art Center, São Paulo Museum of Modern Art, MACBA Museu d’Art Contemporani in Barcelona, Collection Pinault and Castello de Rivoli, among others.
Artist in-conversation series
Curator Clare O’Dowd talks to a range of sculptors about public commissions and collaborations.
Thomas J Price
Wednesday 28 April 2021
Artist Thomas J Price discusses recent examples of his work with fabricators, including the use of bronze foundry processes for sculptures such as Reaching Out 2020, installed at The Line, London and Within the Folds (Dialogue 1) 2020, currently at Sculpture Milwaukee, USA.
Heather Phillipson
Wednesday 12 May 2021
Artist Heather Phillipson talks about her experience of working on two recent public commissions: THE END, for the Fourth Plinth, Trafalgar Square 2020-22, and RUPTURE NO 1: blowtorching the bitten peach, commissioned for Duveen Galleries, Tate Britain (2021).
Nicola Ellis
Wednesday 23 June 2021
Artist Nicola Ellis discusses the works she has produced as part of Return to Ritherdon, a project based on a two-year artist placement at Ritherdon & Co Ltd, a manufacturer of steel enclosures based in Darwen, Lancashire.
Ivan Clarke, Matt Ridsdale and Petra Schmidt
Wednesday 14 July 2021
Ivan Clarke, Matt Ridsdale (Directors, millimetre) and Petra Schmidt (Production Manager, Commissions, Tate Modern) discuss their work on Kara Walker’s Fons Americanus, the 2019 Hyundai Turbine Hall Commission at Tate Modern, highlighting practices of sustainability in fabrication.
About the speakers
Thomas J Price
Thomas J Price
Thomas J Price was born in London in 1981 and studied at Chelsea College of Art, followed by the Royal College of Art. He is a previous recipient of the Arts Council England Helen Chadwick Fellowship. Price has recently been selected to create an ambitious public artwork to be unveiled in 2022 commemorating the Windrush generation in Hackney.
Selected solo exhibitions have been held at prestigious institutions including: The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto (2019); National Portrait Gallery, London (2016); Mac Birmingham (2012); Harewood House (2015) and the Yorkshire Sculpture Park (2014).
Price’s work has also been included in a number of international group shows including: Gold and Magic, ARKEN Museum of Moderne Kunst, Copenhagen (2021); Living Just Enough, Goodman Gallery, London (2020); The Line London, 2020; Sculpture Milwaukee 2020; Get Up Stand Up Now, Somerset House, London (2019); Talisman in the Age of Difference, Stephen Friedman Gallery, London (2018); and Frieze Sculpture, Regent’s Park, London (2017).
Price’s work is included in a number of private and public collections including: The Donum Estate, California; Government Art Collection; Kenneth Montague/The Wedge Collection,Canada; Derwent London; Murderme, London; and the Rennie Collection, Canada.
Heather Phillipson
Heather Phillipson
Heather Phillipson works across video, sculpture, installation, music, drawing, digital media and poetry.
Forthcoming and recent solo exhibitions include: RUPTURE NO 1: blowtorching the bitten peach, Tate Britain Duveen Galleries commission (2021); THE END, for the Fourth Plinth, Trafalgar Square (2020-22); VOLTA, an online audio work, commissioned by Art on the Underground to coincide with the Fourth Plinth (2020); a major exhibition at BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead (2018) and a vast commission for Art on the Underground’s flagship site at Gloucester Road underground station (2018).
Forthcoming and recent group exhibitions include: new commissions for the Shanghai Biennale (2021), British Art Show 9 (2021-22), Sharjah Biennial 14 and the Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin (both 2019) and an online work for the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2018).
Phillips received the Film London Jarman Award in 2016, the European Short Film Festival selection from the International Film Festival Rotterdam in 2018 and is also an award-winning poet. A monograph on her work was published by Prestel in 2020.
Nicola Ellis
Nicola Ellis
Nicola Ellis (b. 1987, St Helens) is a visual artist based in Manchester. She is interested in studying complex ecosystems and environments in order to understand how their internal workings interact to function as a ‘whole’. Within these ecosystems, she observes, documents and subverts the intended function(s) of processes and communications.
Her sculpture, paintings and digital works are shaped by the relationships between people, materials and processes, and often contribute something back to that triangular dynamic. This might be in the form of disrupting an established process with the people who usually work with it, by presenting an existing quality of an object or infrastructure in a different way, or by carving out a new way of operating – as an individual, a collaborator or an outsider – within a specific context.
Ellis has exhibited across the UK and internationally, and her work has been acquired into public and private collections.
Ivan Clarke
Ivan Clarke
Ivan Clarke has a mixed background, initially studying for an Ecology degree and then an Environmental Philosophy Masters. Subsequently he ran a recycling charity before moving towards his more vocational career for which he studied furniture crafts, welding and CAD and went on to establish his own sculptural lighting business.
From there Ivan spent time at Brighton & Hove City Council working in regeneration, community and environmental arts programmes prior to moving to millimetre, where he has been a director for the past thirteen years.
Ivan has a keen interest in sustainability in the context of art and architecture. Whilst acknowledging the ‘art for art’s sake’ sentiment, he finds the tension between the creation of objects and the associated environmental cost fascinating, challenging and distressing. He is no stranger to cognitive dissonance.
Matt Ridsdale
Matt Ridsdale
Matt Ridsdale studied Three-Dimensional Design and Craft (Metals and Glass specialism) at West Surrey College of Art & Design (now University of the Creative Arts). ‘Sustainability Through Design’, a module first taught in 1993 helped to define Matt’s sensibilities and his approach to design and material use. Since then Matt has worked as a designer and maker, working on projects varying in scale from furniture and lighting up to modular building, large scale public sculpture.
Before co-founding millimetre in 2006, Matt was a partner in a product design company, a sole trader designer/maker, and the co-founder of an organic café and gallery in East London. His role at millimetre often involves problem-solving, fabrication strategies and material specification. He particularly enjoys working on long-term public pieces, those that have inherent human value and are not wasteful or fleeting; works that people will inhabit and enjoy. The positive legacy of his work is vital.
Matt has taught modules on the Engineering & Architectural Design MEng course at University College London (UCL) and given lectures centred around the use of materials at both UCL and the Architectural Association.
Petra Schmidt
Petra Schmidt
Petra Schmidt is a London based Creative Producer and currently the Production Manager for commissions at Tate Modern. She primarily oversees the delivery of large artworks created for Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, including those by Kara Walker in 2019 and Anicka Yi, due to open in 2021. Before that, she worked on public art installations for the London Design Festival and in various operational roles at the Crafts Council, British Council, and at the Design Museum.
With the help of an extensive network of skilled collaborators, professional competence, and passion, she makes the things happen that often at first seem impossible. Having worked in the Arts and Events for years, she has witnessed the often wasteful nature of these practices and believes it is our shared responsibility to drive positive change for people and planet through the use of ethical, sustainable, and advanced means of production.
Fabrication and Accessibility
Panel discussion exploring the practicalities of making sculpture for artists with disabilities, Wednesday 13 October 2021.
Artists Anna Berry and Tony Heaton and fabricator Nigel Schofield (MDM Props) discuss the issue of accessibility in art fabrication.
This event explores some of the practical issues for artists with disabilities around working with fabricators on large-scale sculpture and installation projects, from communication to health and safety, funding and more.
About the speakers
Anna Berry
Anna Berry
Anna Berry is a self-taught artist, who works mostly in non-gallery environments. She doesn’t work with a single set of processes nor a single set of ideas, which makes her a very ineffective art brand.
Anna worked with fabricators for the first time on her touring piece Breathing Room 2020. This is an immersive kinetic light installation, which changes your experience of space around you, and for some even alters consciousness. The brightly lit outside is a skeletal armature with a visible slightly-tortuous movement mechanism. This contrasts with the inside, which bathes you in soft luminous light, and moves in an organic way – breathing and blossoming. Having already seen the mechanism, this creates a sense of the uncanny. The immersion in the distinctive movement of the cones is unlike any other sensory experience and can feel profound.
Tony Heaton
Tony Heaton
Tony Heaton OBE is a practising sculptor, Chair of Shape Arts and Consultant/Advisor to many major cultural organisations, including: The British Council, Tate and the Research Centre for Museums and Galleries. He is the initiator of NDACA – the National Disability Arts Collection and Archive.
Heaton’s sculpture Gold Lamé 2014 recently occupied The Liverpool Plinth and is currently installed at the Riverside Museum, Glasgow. His Monument to the Unintended Performer was installed on the Big 4 at the entrance to Channel 4 TV Centre in celebration of the 2012 Paralympics. His sculpture Squarinthecircle? is situated outside the School of Architecture, Portsmouth University.
He was awarded an OBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours, 2013, for services to the arts and the disability arts movement and has an Alumni Award from Lancaster University and Honorary Doctorates from both the University of Leicester and Buckinghamshire New University.
Nigel Schofield
Nigel Schofield
Nigel Schofieldholds a BA degree in 3-Dimensional Design and further qualifications specialising in wood, metal and plastics. Having worked in the creative construction industries for over thirty years, his career began as an artist/model-maker/builder working in theatre, film, TV and the art world.
After several years’ experience he joined the fledgling company MDM and helped build it into the company it is today. MDM celebrated their twenty fifth anniversary in 2019.
In the 1990s he worked with several young British artists to bring their ideas to life; this led to him concentrating on the art world and specifically sculpture as a chosen field. This continues to this day. He has continued to help and develop younger artists as well as working with some of the world’s most established artists. Notable clients include: Damien Hirst, Anselm Kiefer, Anish Kapoor, Yayoi Kusama, Marina Abramovic, Tracey Emin and Anthony Gormley. Institutions he has worked with include The British Museum and The National Gallery.
Valuing Sculpture: Contemporary Perspectives on Art, Craft and Industry, 1660-1860
Two-day conference with keynote speakers Dr Greg Sullivan and Dr Rebecca Wade, 27–28 July 2021.
The indeterminate position of sculpture within the arts is a malleable concept which continues to challenge researchers. Categorisations such as art, craft, or industry contrive barriers, separating works from one another and disavowing the cross-fertilisations between sculptors, makers and artisans involved in the formal practices and aesthetics of art production.
This conference will refocus attention on how links have been consistently made between media and making processes to categorise and subsequently value sculpture. The conference is organised by Sammi Scott and Charlotte Davis (University of York), Caitlin Scott (University of Sheffield), and Hannah Kaspar (University of Leeds) in collaboration with the Henry Moore Institute. With keynote speakers Dr Greg Sullivan (University of York/ St Paul’s Cathedral) and Dr Rebecca Wade (independent).
This conference was recorded and is available to watch on request, please email us at research@henry-moore.org if you are interested.