Katy Morrison speaks to artist, maker, educator and climate activist Brigitte Jurack about Fieldnotes, her largest solo exhibition to date, produced by HOME with the support of Manchester School of Art.
Curated by Clarissa Corfe, Fieldnotes presented a constellation of interdisciplinary works produced across different times and locations, weaving together thematic threads of environmental sustainability, craft and labour to expose and explore our individual and collective relationship to the natural world.
KM: The exhibition takes a view of your work over the last four years. It presents a culmination of diverse material outcomes that feels like a mode of reporting or mapping, and functions as a landscape in its own right that offers diffractive encounters with different forms and moments of sculptural research.
Could you talk a little bit about the works included in the exhibition and their relationship(s) to one another? And what seeing them together in this space might have done to your ideas, questions, thoughts, etc., especially with the introduction of new participants; has anything revealed itself?
BJ: It has been a wonderful privilege to show work developed over the past four and a bit years for the first time together. The title of the exhibition, Fieldnotes, functions like a bracket, that just like the space itself holds the work together. Some of the works have been shown in solo exhibitions and group exhibitions before, other work is so recent that it was created just shortly before the show opened.
In addition, there is work produced during the duration of the show by participants of the skep making workshops and those who engage with the whitewashed twigs and branches collected during autumn storms.
If we, as a thought, understand the artworks as notes, that is, observational records and reflections in various materials taken on/in the field and refined, reflected upon in the studio, then the coming together of all these observational records allows for a clearer understanding of the field itself. A field that is marked by a set of interconnecting enquiries such as how can we, as urban dwellers and recreational users of the ‘great outdoors’ engage critically with ‘landscape’? What I mean here directly links to continuous education, that the ‘landscape’ we encounter today is the result of thousands of years of human interaction and extraction (mining, logging, farming, monocultures) and billions of years of pre-human interactions (geological time).
For example, if you look at the moorlands on the outskirts of Manchester, such as the area around Dovestone near Saddleworth Moor, what you see now, such as eroding and drying moorland, forestry plantations, and an interlocking set of water reservoirs, is the result of thousands of years of multiple interactions, including receding glaziers, logging during the Bronze age, mining and quarrying, air pollution from industrial and post-industrial Manchester, monoculture including overgrazing of sheep, and underplanting due to grouse, land ownership, weather, day trippers, water management and so on. Far from being ‘natural’ per se or ‘traditional landscape’, its current state is the result of a myriad of interactions, which also implies that it will continue to change, and if we were to be inclined to do so, it could change into a healthier, biologically more diverse (greener) version of its current status quo.
Another question is how can figurative sculpture, through its representational power, enable profound experiences that take us beyond ourselves? In other words, that moves us from our self-obsessed human centric viewpoint. An encounter, that respects other living creatures and their right to be and live on the same shared earth. As French philosopher Michelle Serres and writer Melanie Challenger say: the simple truth is that we share one earth, and that the earth and her living organisms and creatures can live without us, but we can’t live without her and them.
There is something which interests me as a sculptor, a maker of three dimensional ‘images’ rather than let’s say as a photographer. The great thing about sculpture is that you work in the round, to a scale, to a total thing (rather than a cropped or framed image). But there is also this fascination with statues – the encounter – where the material (stone, clay, bronze, wood, etc.) comes alive as ‘other’. As another being, that gazes at you, asserts its presence, and if it is really good, also touches you, moves you out of self-centeredness towards awe and a recognition of one’s own finiteness.
The super glossy, super sharp high-definition digital image on the screen or the billboard can’t do that because it does not allow for alterity anymore. It treats everything and everyone with the same digital retina. Like glass eyes inserted into taxidermy animals, the eyes of the fox in the photograph are dead, there is no gaze.
KM: The exhibition feels like a constellation of works inspired by the expansive networks of the natural world. We are invited to wander through these networks, encountering new questions and ideas that invite us to wander in new critical directions.
I’m interested in the different ways that art (especially sculptural practice) can create structures and spaces for knowing and thinking through – or in this case learning and exploring.
What interests me is how it serves to expand the ways in which we can approach and think about sculptural practice; understanding it as an active process of exploring, thinking and learning, as much as it is a tangible, material articulation of ways of knowing about/being in the world. Acknowledging sculptural practice as a significant instigator of an expansive enquiry/proposition.
Could you tell me about your relationship to/with sculpture as a tool for research, or as a process of enquiry? And does it change when in proximity to other forms of practice?
BJ: Some of what you asked about, I guess I have already touched upon in the second point above: the great advantage of sculpture, including as Rosalind Krauss wrote about, in the expanded field, is that it is about presence. The physicality of being in space and time. It’s about touch, not only the obvious touch of the artisan or artist making the work, but also the potential of the sculpture touching the heart, the core of the beholder.
When in the early 1970s Allan Kaprow, Joseph Beuys, Mierle Laderman Ukeles and others really began to assert actions as sculptural practices, they not only connected to early DADA artists but also the activism of the labour movement, Vietnam peace marches and student protests and sit-ins of the late 1960s. Yoko Ono and John Lennon’s bed-ins for peace (1969) falls within this thinking too. For me, street sweeping actions, sit-ins and happenings are part of the sculptural realm, since they isolate a set of gestures and magnify them in that process, making the ‘normal’ monumental, making the everyday, overlooked, the focus of attention, thus providing the opportunity to change the value systems of those viewing the work (but also of course of those helping to create the work).
For me, the sculptural process in the widest sense is dialogical. It is always a dialogue between the material (the physical world), laws of gravity, time, space and the maker. The materials can vary: vapour, stone, human, animal, wood, plastic, straw, bark, paper, mercury, gravity, time, space and so can the cultural and societal embeddedness of the maker (their citizenship, membership to a particular society, geographical home, language, cultural background, economy and period).
You asked how sculpture is used as a tool for research, or a process of enquiry and if it changes when in proximity to other practices. In regard to this exhibition, I don’t think the sculptures behave differently in proximity to other practices (i.e. drawing, tiny paintings, text, photographs) since I think my interest in the physicality of the world (touch, scale, space, time, weight) seeps through every medium, including the writing and the drawing and of course the performative actions in Joya and at Dovestone.
As a tool of enquiry and research I would suggest that it is a language in its own right, different from music, or film, dance or painting or spoken and written language.
It’s a thinking and talking with and through the hands.
On the micro residencies at Belong (Dementia care home specialist), I use clay or occasionally mosaic. Participants in the sessions make things, the way their hands and eyes see. I am still always amazed. There is a tacit knowing, which we learn when digging up sand on the beach, or making dough for bread, that lives within us, an immediacy of the material. Clay is so super responsive, a push with the thumb and it changes. I like that. Of course, this malleability is also a bit daunting, so little resistance, perhaps too many opportunities.
KM: The exhibition feels like an invitation to consider individual and collective experience, action and responsibility; developing an understanding of ourselves as a part of something wider. Entering into a conversation that is bigger than us, but at the same time one that is integral to our everyday lives.
Participation in these ideas (from both a mental and physical perspective) frames the various works, with an active public programme supporting practical engagement with your work.
What’s the role/importance of people and participation in your work? What’s the role/importance of working with different generations?
BJ: When Clarissa Corfe and I discussed the details of the exhibition, it was clear from the start that we wanted a live element in the exhibition, something that was changing, something which was still in progress. A bit like a flower bud: a promised potentiality. I also wanted something that enabled a sense of immediate and visual response. The twigs I mentioned before, collected by myself and the dog in my local tiny bit of woodland, were stripped of their bark and then painted with gesso. I never thought that they would be so successful but within a few days the bags full of whitened branches had been adorned with patterns, as visitors to the gallery were invited to do.
I never thought that most visitors would have wanted to engage with this, but they did, quietly, drawing with felt tip pen, balancing lines, squares and rectangles, or hieroglyphs on the thin twigs. Their gestures were shared throughout the exhibition with other visitors and with the growing number of twigs on the shelves. A very beautiful and generous sharing. No words are needed. Just being there for 10-15 minutes in a creative dialogue with a white twig and the ‘logic’ of pattern making.
There were also other forms of participation in the exhibition, especially the skep making workshops (5 workshops of 2 hours each) for up to 8 participants. On Saturday the workshop was from 4-6pm, and the gallery was busy. The workshop participants sat in a circle near the monoprint of the woolly mammoth, the black and white heritage documentary of two farmers making skeps together and photos/drawings which are about doing something together. For me, the making together is significant here. The recognition and celebration of working together in space and time. Akin to a band, or a small chamber orchestra or a community choir. I love the fact that the two farmers made the skeps together, prepared the material together and enjoyed each other’s company. A shared ‘problem’ or task, a learning of how the body moves with the process and the material.
From the outside looking in (through the windows of the gallery) during the duration of the show, the skep workshops are very beautiful peinture vivante (or tableau vivante, a living painting) but that was not intentional, that just happened, since the hard surfaces of the architecture of the square (all glass, steel and cladding) contrasts with the contemplative but focused working with straw. I’m not sure if anybody has had a chance in the centre of Manchester to see, feel, smell straw. It is so much more poignant here in Manchester then doing it in let’s say in North Wales (Ruthin).
During the workshop, two gallery visitors became really emotional: one said, glimpsing at us, sitting in the circle making the skeps, reminded him of “back home – in Malawi”, where he said, making this kind of ‘baskets’ would be common. Another one said he felt immediately ‘teleported’ to his home in Ecuador, where they would use reed, but the same lip work technique.
I understand participation very much as a making together. What is made together may well be separate, single authored pieces. Like the jugs and Palissy plates made in Belong, or the participation leads to making one multi-authored larger piece (like the skeps).
Participation in the temporary more performative work is guided by similar impulses: the togetherness in doing something is crucial.
You asked about different generations. So far, I have worked with people in their eighties and nineties, and with young people (teenagers to let’s say 25 – 28-year-olds), but also on occasions in the past with school age children.
I think when working with young people I am focusing more on discussing ideas and visualising ideas in regard to a fairer, better and more engaging environment. Play, material exploration and making is focused more on the near future. When I am working with people in their eighties, it’s more about the here and now of being and feeling. It is beautiful to witness the wonderful wit, ‘flippancy’ and gutsiness which seems to be released at an advanced age.
You can listen Brigitte Jurack in conversation with Tim Brennan (Professor of Art and Head of Art and Performance at Manchester School of Art, MMU) for a special edition Bunker Talk here.
Curated by the Performance Research Group at Manchester School of Art, Bunker Talks explore geopolitical, ecological or economic concerns. The talks create space for critical encounters, presentations, provocation and dialogue.
Fieldnotes was at HOME, 29 October 2022 – 29 January 2023.
Katy Morrison is an independent curator and researcher based in Manchester.
Published 17.02.2023 by Jazmine Linklater in Interviews
2,394 words