Craigie Horsfield in conversation at utopia art sydney
Craigie Horsfield in conversation at utopia art sydney
Š utopia art sydney
Ellery Creek Big Hole, West MacDonnell Ranges, July 2011. 2012, dry print on arches paper, 136 x 98cm (image size)
Craigie Horsfield in conversation at Utopia Art Sydney Chloe Watson
When we make a work, especially a representational work, it appears to be of the world, but it is a story we are telling each other and those stories have a very real significance in the way that we understand the world, and each other.1
Four dry prints by Craigie Horsfield are pinned to the gallery walls at Utopia Art Sydney. These unique prints are of images made during Horsfield’s trip to the Western Desert in 2011; at a sunset by a waterhole, as trees and red rock are reflected in a still, but shimmering, pool. This is the first time Horsfield has worked in Australia. Yet, these should not simply be understood as pictures of an Australian landscape. Throughout the process of image-making, Horsfield attends to the act of representation itself, and the kinds of acts other people have made in depicting this landscape. In particular, Horsfield was interested in the aesthetics that strangers impose upon a place they are not familar with. As the artist explains:
My work is very much concerned with ideas of relation and slow time. The materiality of the surface for example, has to do with the physical apprehension of the world, the way that we speak about the world and to each other, what the meaning of that speaking is, what significance it has for our perception of ourselves both as individuals and as social beings. This lies behind what you see.
The definition of the images, coupled with the textured grain of the paper, creates a compelling, painterly surface that complicates the illusory planes of reflecting water. Surface and seeing, place and its representation, its image, are brought under scrutiny. As a set, the images present slightly different visions of the same place: a reflection is still in one image, yet registers a wavering movement in the next. Here time at once encompasses a present that passes and a past that is present.2 For Horsfield, it is not just the moment of the image that marks the act of creation, but the thought and work that occurs before, during and after the apparent moment of the photograph. The date marked for these works in their titles (July 2011. 2012) indicates the duration of the creative act; at once specific (a particular month of a particular year), and dispersed, extending through time, until the very moment in which you, the spectator, views the tangible print on the wall of this Sydney gallery, or even in digital form on the internet. 1 2
All subsequent quotes are derived from a recorded conversation between Craigie Horsfield and the author, 19 June 2012 c.f. Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism, Zone Books, 1990
At another level, Horsfield is hesitant to call the works pinned to the gallery walls photographs:
Everything that is computed, in other words virtually any image that we use that isn’t hand made, is photographic now, it all goes through a computer through which you can scan anything - a drawing, a painting, whatever - it’s all photographic. So photography is no longer a very useful word; it is so ubiquitous, so generalised.
In a similar way, these prints represent just one facet of Horsfield’s practice.
I don’t distinguish very much between mediums…. I make photographs as one of the things that I have done, always, but I also make soundworks, tapestries; I make performances, installations...
For instance, Horsfield has worked collaboratively with Reinier Rietveld to create a sound installation in the Turbine Hall of Cockatoo Island for the 18th Biennale of Sydney, which incorporates recordings from the island itself, mixed with other sounds,‘from screeching trams to places that subconsciously jog our shared globally mediated cultural memory – such as the clearing of 9-11 debris in New York City– whilst avoiding recognisable vocal communications.’3 Horsfield and Rietveld are long-time collaborators in such site-specific sound projects. For example. they worked together in 2007 on the sound elements of the Relation exhibition at the MCA in Sydney. Horsfield will make, from these dry prints of Ellery Creek Big Hole, unique Jacquard tapestries in silk, wool, cotton and synthetic yarn, in collaboration with a specialised weaving workshop in Belgium; the only workshop in the world to produce tapestries at such scale and definition.4 Horsfield has been a pioneer of this medium, working with the team at Flanders Tapestry over the past five years, as their high-technology weaving technique has continued to develop. Whereas a conventional loom will carry between 6 and 8 threads per line, the two looms at Flanders carry twelve threads in any one line: Having twelve [threads per line] has a very significant effect, because it means you can have up to 240 colours per tapestry. That may sound quite large but in fact the inkjet printer on your desk has millions of colours, so you are thinking in quite a different way from a photograph. It changes the whole way you think about colour...
And the other factor in addition to colour is that the tapestry has a relief; it has substance. The change that we have achieved in the past years is that the relief now responds to the image; the texture, the depth, the fullness, corresponds to the image… this is a very recent advance, because before you could have relief but you couldn’t attach it to an image – it
3 See artist statement 4 For instance, for his exhibition Slow Time and the Present at the Kunsthalle Basel, Horsfield has produced a tapestry over 20 metres long, depicting a congregation of pilgrims dressed in eerie white gowns. The sheer monumentality of this tapestry, alongside others in the exhibition, is difficult to imagine without seeing it in the flesh.
would be a regular pattern across the tapestry. But we can now, even to quite extreme degrees, use this as an articulation of vision.
It is not only the physical presence of these tapestries that is important; the processes involved in the creation of a tapestry are also significant, as the final product is articulated through a series of complex translations from image to computer to loom to thread. An image must be thought in different ways, becoming data, instructions for a machine: ‘I prepare the data over a period of time, and then work with the translator at the weaver’s to interpret the work as an instruction for the machine.’ Joseph Jacquard invented a semi-mechanical weaving process in 1805, which revolutionised the weaving industry, perhaps in a similar way to the Gutenberg press. In a strange loop:
The first people inventing computers recognised that the punch-card of the Jacquard tapestry gave instruction, which they could use for their reasoning machine. And it’s rather beautiful that now we use very sophisticated computers to give instructions to machines many generations on from that of the first looms. There is a rather beautiful symmetry and a circularity to it.
When Horsfield first began using tapestries in his art, very view people would look at them:
They said this is an archaic technique that has nothing to do with contemporary art. That is because they simply didn’t understand that the technique and its associations may be archaic, but these tapestries would be impossible without highly complex digital processes that are fast evolving.
Time loops in mysterious ways. In tapestry, in print, in sound; narratives emerge and recede as threads, intertwining to compose complex patterned fields. Horsfield weaves images that ponder our human interactions with the world and with each other.
© Chloe Watson, Utopia Art Sydney, 2012
Ellery Creek Big Hole, West MacDonnell Ranges, July 2011. 2012, dry print on arches paper, 98.5 x 98cm (image size)
Ellery Creek Big Hole, West MacDonnell Ranges, July 2011. 2012, dry print on arches paper, 82.5 x 147cm (image size)
Ellery Creek Big Hole, West MacDonnell Ranges, July 2011. 2012, dry print on arches paper, 98 x 137.5cm (image size)
Interconnected installation
Craigie Horsfield and Christopher Hodges, Western Desert, 2011
Craigie Horsfield in conversation at utopia art sydney
utopia art sydney 2 Danks Street Waterloo NSW 2017 Telephone: + 61 2 9699 2900 Facsimile: + 61 2 9699 2988 email: utopiaartsydney@ozemail.com.au www.utopiaartsydney.com.au Š utopia art sydney
Utopia Art Sydney 2 Danks Street Waterloo NSW 2017 Telephone: + 61 2 9699 2900 Facsimile: + 61 2 9699 2988 email: utopiaartsydney@ozemail.com.au www.utopiaartsydney.com.au