The esoteric sculptural world of Conrad Shawcross

CHELSEA BARRACKS – The beginning of an artistic legacy

By Andrea Marechal Watson

‘Poetry and Sculpture exist to keep our passions alive’ the Irish poet W.B Yeats used to tell his fellow students. At Chelsea Barracks a series of inscriptions bring together these two pillars of the fine arts.

The Chelsea Barracks Frieze takes the form of a series of poems on four walls designed to connect the new buildings by Eric Parry Architects with the historic environment. Arranged thematically, the complex and intertwining themes that we encounter as we move through the points of the compass include visions of paradise, sylvan woods, tamed and untamed nature, the Green Man, soldiers, pleasure gardens, the music of Mozart, the works of Shakespeare and Chelsea’s famous Physic Garden. All allude to themes of solace, remembrance, joy and peace. Embodying global ideals, the verses are rooted in London scenes while drawing from European and Middle Eastern traditions and are described as a “song to London past and present.”

The compositional method used by the poet Pele Cox is based on the classical cento or a literary device made from quotations from earlier poets with added fragments by the author.

“You could call it a ‘patchwork’ or garden of poetry filled with gems from poetic history. It is not just a poetic inscription, but metapoetic, a poem about poetry. The quotations and fragments from earlier poets make them precedents, interlocutors and witnesses,” says Cox.

The Entrance (North) wall poem draw from passages in theEpic of Gilgamesh, the ancient record of the Sumerian king which is said to have influenced Homer’s Odyssey and Iliad. The evocative words IN THE GARDEN OF THE SUN – a fragment from the epic – is featured on the first panel of the entrance wall and is the setting off point for the Frieze.

On the Road (South) Wall we encounter the Green Man, an ancient pagan spirit who represents our original connection to nature.

I AM THE GREEN MAN

MY FLINT EYES SPARK AND DART

“He is an allusion to the pagan nature spirit but he also represents a soldier in camouflage at rest after battle telling his story,” says Cox.

ON THE LAWNS WARRIORS DREAM

PUT DOWN THEIR ARMS

ALL AT EASE IN THIS TEMPLE OF PEACE

The Pleasure Garden Wall (East) bears the record: ALL CAME TO RANELAGH. This is a reference to the 18th century Ranelagh Pleasure Gardens which have an important connection to the site. The gardens were so called because they occupied the site of Ranelagh House, sadly demolished in 1805. The house and its grounds, which stood in what was then a village by the Thames, drew crowds of pleasure seekers, courting couples and aristocrats who paid the princely sum of two shillings and sixpence to enjoy concerts masquerades and picnics. Mozart, aged 9, performed in its elegant Rotunda in 1765. The gardens are now the site of the Chelsea Flower Show.

“This wall seeks to give a feeling of joy and abandon, reminding us the garden is a place for celebration, community and the imagination,” says Cox.

The Chelsea Physic Garden Wall (West) references the poignant and familiar words spoken by Ophelia to her brother in Shakespeare’s Hamlet:

THERE’S ROSEMARY FOR REMEMBRANCE

This elegant piece is interwoven with a tapestry of flowers and healing plants, including lemon balm, violets, marigolds and mint as well as the poppy.

The poems can be read fleetingly or memorised for this is a public space, where for the first time in 100 years, local people, residents and visitors can stroll or sit to enjoy the serenity and beauty of the setting. As part of the landscape, the frieze is both textual and ‘concrete’ but it also responds to light, weather and seasons, at different times the elevations will evoke a variety of sensations.

This major public art commission is part of the commitment made by the developers of Chelsea Barracks to restore public access to large parts of the site – in total five acres – and at the same time initiate a programme of cultural development which build on the already major investment which has been made in the work of British artisans and designers both indoors and out at Chelsea Barracks. Of particular note is the two year long restoration of the former garrison church which involved a host of British artisans including lime plasterers, fresco painters, tilers and stained glass experts. A new bronze bell, an exact replica of the damaged original, was commissioned from the last surviving bell maker in the UK, Taylor & Co of Loughborough.

This programme will continue for several years, resulting not only in valuable commissions for aspiring artists but also in the creation of an exciting new cultural district in this historic area.

There are an estimated 20,000 outdoor artworks in our towns, cities, parks and gardens. They are valued for helping anchor their host community to a time and a place as well as evoking memories and enriching a shared landscape and heritage. However cuts in Arts Council funding have led to the number of artists being employed in this field shrinking by a fifth according to think tank Ixia’s latest survey.

It is therefore all the more important for the private sector to support this area and at Chelsea Barracks, the developers have gone far above and beyond their duty. Working with placemaking agency Futurecity, Qatari Diar have sought to place art and design at the heart of the development, not as an afterthought but as an integral part of the planning and development process so that it will leave its mark on the community hopefully for centuries to come.

Years ago, when I first came across Futurecity they were at the first stages of a movement to ensure that art was no longer an ill thought out and last minute addition to a development but embedded at the very start of a project. This garland of poems at Chelsea Barracks is a perfect example of how far we have come since those days.

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1000 words

Conrad Shawcross, the first artist commissioned to create a work for Chelsea Barracks, has in a brief space of time become one of Britain’s best regarded public realm artists. Yet still he tends to elude definition. His sculptures are explorations of (among other things) mechanics, numerology, mathematics and harmony made visible as art. They have been said to blur the lines between geometry and psychology.

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In his early years, he was regarded primarily as a mechanical sculptor because of the moving works that defined his career post Slade school of art. The most widely seen of these should rightly speaking be his Terrace Wires commission work, The Interpretation of Movement (a 9:8 in blue) at St Pancras International. However Shawcross is disappointed. “It is somewhat lost in the vast station, I had to make the colours similar to the roof as I was told that bright colours could confuse the train drivers who might mistake it for some sort of signal if it was red or yellow,” he says.

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Earlier mechanical works such as Continuum (2004) at the National Maritime Museum and his rope machine in the Holborn Tunnel (2009-10) brought him to the attention of the Royal Academy of Art and he duly was elected a member.

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“I am committed to making more mechanical sculptures next year. People associate me with them, and they are close to my heart,” says Shawcross.

At 41, he has an impressive CV – with international exhibitions and shows and in Britain a number of highly recognizable public pieces including the 14 metre tall Paradigm outside the Francis Crick Institute and the even more visible Optic Cloak at Greenwich Peninsula with its shimmering tetrahedrons.

OpticCloak was curated by placemaking agency Futurecity as part of a cultural strategy for the Greenwich area and joined Antony Gormley’s Quantum Cloud the figure of a man enmeshed in a cumulus of fine wires .

Now the agency are taking the same strategy to Chelsea Barracks and working with developers Qatari Diar to build a cultural legacy. Shawcross won the commission for the first permanent piece, Bi Cameral. Located opposite Dove Place at the junction of Chelsea Bridge Road, the sculpture rises 10 metres from a raised planter and has a span of 8 metres. At first glance it looks like a burnished blue thorn tree.

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The title of the piece comes from one of the many obscure books that Shawcross admires: The Origins of Consciousness in the Break Down of the Bi Cameral Mind by Julian Jaynes. At his Hackney studio, where he shows me the original rust coloured maquette for the piece, he opens the book and begins to read:

“Oh what a world of unseen visions and heard silences, this insubstantial county of the mind! ….an invisible mansion of all moods, musing and mysteries, a infinite resort of disappointments and discoveries. A whole kingdom where each of us reign alone…”

And so Jaynes begins his quest to discover the problem of consciousness, where it came from and why.

“Literally translated Bi Cameral means two chambers, like the Houses of Commons and Lords,” saysShawcross. “The work is a counterpoint to the rest of the Chelsea Barracks site. It is lyrical, it will create shadows, it will reflect light. The people who will have the best view of it are arguably those living opposite so it really does work as a piece of public art.”

In terms of the structure, Shawcross says he was partly inspired by examples of Japanese joinery. “All the connections are made with pins – there is no welding which is unusual for structures of this size.”

He also makes reference to the nearby Chelsea Physic Garden as an important historical factor in the setting.

“Horticulture was a key part of this area once. I was looking at hope and aspiration through plants – symbols simplified and idealised. The piece had to be sculptural yet natural. It is very mathematical but has echoes of many things, so hopefully, it will have many reminiscences and oscillate between different meanings for different people.”

From 2009-2011 Shawcross was Artist in Residence at the Science Museum in London and plundered its resources. He became fascinated by the idea of expanding forms – his 2018 Victoria Miro gallery show After the Explosion Before the Collapse was seen as a tribute to the Big Bang theory. Yet though he recently began an interview with art critic Jonathan Jones by referring to Thomas Kuhn’s book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, he prefers not to be compared to a scientist. Among his influencers he names Dorothy Hodgkin, who developed X-ray crystallography, a method used to determine the three-dimensional structures of molecules; Buckminster Fuller; Carl Andre (of the famous Tate bricks controversy) and Rule-based art.

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And then there are the books. Another key text referred to by Shawcross is Harmonograph, the mathematics of music. It consists mostly of diagrams created by a Victorian tool, the harmonograph, which was used to measure the movement in buildings by means of pendulums and pens and which had the side effect of creating superb patterns.

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Shawcross’s Manifold series (one destined for the new Crossrail station at Shoreditch is to be installed in 2021) are what he called “two helical interferences” based on the idea of a three dimensional realization of two musical chords falling into silence.

The best way to picture how such shapes actually look is a quick visit to the website where the series he has worked on include Axioms, Continuums, Fractures, Harmonies, Lattices, Lightworks, Paradigms, Plosions, Preretroscopes and Swarf drawings.

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If time permits and you can arrange permission, much better is a visit to the studio in what was once called Murder Mile but is today a thoroughly gentrified part of Hackney.

Here in the small office below the home where Shawcross also lives the shelves are filled with the experimental shapes that look like the inside of a engineer’s brain: here an exploding pyramid, a stupa, bits of metal that look like meteors, wooden building blocks, coils of wire, delicate metal snowflakes all ranged above row upon row of black box folders labelled Press, RA, Sketches etc. Order in disorder.

“There is (self-consciously) something of the Victorian Gentleman scientist about Shawcross, the untethered engineer, physicist and metaphysicist,’ Wallpaper editor NickCompton writes of the artist’s fascination with nuts, bolts, cogs and axles. “He’d make a great Frankenstein.”

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Bi Cameral is, as mentioned above, the first permanent public artwork for Chelsea Barracks. It follows an initial temporary sculpture trail created in partnership with the internationally renowned Opera Gallery. Future works will undergo the same selection process with the intention that the works will not be chosen as it were by an invisible hand from above but through the collaboration of the local community and in this way they will be seen as a shared mission and ownership.


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