Jurisdictions: a short space of time at the Bury Art Museum by Derek Horton
Contrasts of scale dominate the experience of this exhibition. It occupies just one small room, but is expansive in the range of concerns in Leach’s work and in the global space over which that work extends, alluded to in the title, Jurisdictions. One wall holds a linear sequence of preliminary works for Leach’s ongoing project which will eventually comprise 196 tiny drawings of every capital city in the world. Small, but solidly three-dimensional, each one is drawn with pencil, scalpel and burnishing tools on the gessoed face of an oak block. Their modular construction builds a world in miniature, echoing the ways in which the cities depicted are also constructed entities, built up systematically over time. From Abu Dhabi to Zagreb, similarities appear greater than differences, reminding us of the extent to which global capital now pervades the nation state. The drawings derive not from ‘real-world’ observation but from images sourced from the internet, mirroring how specific locations are drawn together in the all-encompassing web of data exchange that eases the flow of information and capital. The scale and viewpoint of these drawings determines that the highly-populated cities depicted are devoid of visible people, their very smallness ironically emphasising the immensity of both the architecture and the political structures of the metropolis, serving as a metaphor for the dehumanising aspects of the capitalist worldview. Human labour, fundamental in the building and life of these cities, is absent from the drawings, replaced in our perception by the time-consuming labour of the artist, making the optical and psychological impact of the miniaturisation considerable. Any artwork can either be glanced at or studied intensely depending on the propensities of the viewer, but here a mere glance would reveal nothing at all, so looking at this work demands an investment of serious attention. The close looking required prompts reflection on the conceptual and metaphorical aspects of the work as much as the technique and skill involved in its production. The remainder of the exhibition comprises other drawings and small paintings continuing Leach’s consistent theme of drawing as a metaphor for the geo-political and spatial relationships that delineate our position in the world, defining the ‘jurisdictions’ of the exhibition’s title by means of conceptual lines, actualised here through Leach’s drawing process. They combine seductive aesthetic qualities with thought-provoking complexities, for example in two beautifully rendered landscapes of the Diomede Islands in the Bering Strait. Visible across the sea from each other, these topographically similar islands are divided by two imaginary lines of immense significance, the international date line and the US–Russian border. In another we see the naval ceremony, Crossing The Line, marking a sailor’s first crossing of the Equator, drawn from a 1938 photograph aboard HMS Norfolk, a ship on which Leach’s grandfather served in the Second World War, a significant dividing line in 20th century history. Drawing is a tool for enquiry into the world around us, delineating its spaces and processing our ideas about it. In Leach’s work it is also a means to think about the impact of the invisible conceptual lines imposed on our world, dividing and defining us socially and politically, and perhaps to consider the possibility of their erasure.
https://corridor8.co.uk/article/chris-leach-jurisdictions-a-short-space-of-time/
Interview with Chris Leach by Lorraine Callanan (Lecturer - LIT Limerick)
Can you describe your studio and how, if at all, that affects your work space?
I don't have and have never really felt the need for a specific studio space. The main focus of my practice are the miniature works and other than a flat table top and decent lighting there are no other real criteria. The impetus for the work - the shifts in scale - came a few years ago just out of curiosity more than anything. I had a photograph I had taken of a group of people walking down a road which I decided on a whim to try to scale down. In a previous incarnation I used to be a printer/graphic designer so I was used to looking closely at images, how they were constructed essentially out of four colours in a series of dots always intrigued me, the idea of bringing something down in scale was more of an experiment than anything else. I had done a number of works where the opposite had occurred, I was curious as to how those shifts in scale would operate at a miniscule size with both the image and also in a material sense.
Tell me about your process (I can’t envisage how you work to such a scale), where things begin, how they evolve etc. Is there a vision for a body of work or do you work on singular pieces?
I only ever have one piece of work going at a time. The mainstay of my work is derived from photographs which are gridded out usually to approximately 1 inch squares, this matrix is then lightly redrawn on whatever material I am using, be it paper or primed wood or board. The surface operates in different ways depending on my aims and intentions. A paper surface is fundamentally different to work on than a primed oak/board surface. The ways, in which the qualities of line and material operate, the mattness or sheen of the pencil, the chalk and the crayon, the contrasting qualities of waxiness and opaqueness have totally different systems of operation dependant on the material surface. What I am attempting to do with each piece is to reconcile these different qualities of material, the sheen and opacity, into a kind of layered engineered quality, I work over and work back each material and mark to formulate something recognisable tonally and structurally as the thing I am trying to render.
The main impetus of my recent work has been the cityscapes. These arose out of a small work I did on paper of the view from the top of one of the twin towers of the World Trade Centre in New York. I remember having completed it and being quite startled by what it actually did, both in subject matter and in those kinds of shifts in perspective. I had a bit of a 'eureka' moment with it.
The subject matter for my current work has arisen out of a consistency of aim and intention over the last few years. My first forays into shifts in scale where determined I suppose purely by experiments in the manipulation of scale and materials. The cityscapes derived from an interest in the geo political and spatial relationships of making a drawing or constructing an image and a kind of inquiry into the consequences of line and demarcation. I was interested in the wider political implications of line both in a practical and philosophical sense. The works in the exhibition at Ormston House were part of a series of works (currently on display in Tullamore) which were views of cities based along the Prime Meridian and the Equator. I was interested in how the ideological consequences of making a line on a piece of paper essentially becomes a process of drawing a distinction between one thing and another, becoming not only a mark in space but also the separation of two separate spaces, a delineation or perhaps the rendering of a particular jurisdiction. It is almost as if the topography of the world can be seen as a symptom of that process, which is of course taught at an early age and becomes a way of negotiating temporal and spatial qualities and also an exercise in essentially possessing and quantifying a position in the world. These things have evolved over time into the world we know (or think we know) and operate in today. There is an international consensus in the structure of time down to fractions of a millisecond. This is a consensus which has been brought about by a process of knowledge and also a consensus of political power relationships. Our awareness of time and space, our geopolitical relationships are all quantified by relics of a very specific political agenda which dictates where we are in time and space. It is these things that I am interested in, how we become aware of those relationships and how those relationships can be altered or made apparent. How they are in some respects essential to our functioning as a society but how they are also in very particular ways a very arbitrary grid that we impose upon the world.
How long would it take you to complete a piece?
The works can take a number of days to complete. They are methodical and the particular process tends to eliminate any sense of gesture or spontaneity. They are very molecular and basic, each one is I think a construction, built piece by piece and these processes do tend to mirror the ways in which the city or the work itself is constructed, geometrically, methodically, over time. They are intentionally laboured, having specifically durational element to them, so that the drawings, although tiny can be seen to be made and to the viewer to have gone through a very apparent process.
In the show your pieces stand out for me personally in two ways:
Scale (there is no getting away from it!!) – And how this engages the viewer: I found it fascinating in terms of how I was drawn into the pieces. How important is the “scale” and why?
The works sits, for me, into the context of a wider narrative inquiring into relativities of scale and proximity. A piece of art consists of a series of relational and psychological shifts or narratives that are informed by both the artist/the art and the relationship that the audience has with the thing that is seen. It is about where you are as a viewer in relation to the particular place; the works are about a composite knowledge of those locations which are very specific, geographically, socially and politically. The shift in scale does something quite peculiar psychologically, it allows the viewer a particular kind of focus, it allows the mind to recalibrate and it allows the eye to examine; to be drawn into the work, to go a journey with the drawing and to become aware of the topography and the geometry of a place whilst all the time being conscious of the work being 'drawn'. The surface of work functions as a kind of 'screen', a lens within the world; it becomes another layer of information relating to a whole series of operations concerning the structure of the world and my own particular enquiry into it. I have made larger works which fundamentally don't do the same thing in the same way, I am happy that with the small works I have found a mechanism, a way in which the viewer can engage in a relationship with the works and which have a very particular process of operation both materially and psychologically. I think that by miniaturising the world, it becomes in some sense, a manageable entity. There are spatial and temporal relationships that occur that we make considerable presumptions about, but they function as part of a wider socio political narrative brought into being for very particular means and riddled with all kinds of ambiguities and historical baggage. I try to make work that is stripped of metaphor; it is very specific work, unburdened by any kind of narrative fictions. There is in some sense a political agenda contextualising the work, but the work itself is also non-political or perhaps apolitical. It seeks to define the particular places depicted with a certain amount of empathy, to be non-judgemental both culturally and socially. It is perhaps too about the triumph of capitalism and nation building, but what it also tries to show is that these places and this world is very much a 'made' entity and therefore can be fundamentally redesigned, or re-made, the drawings show that the world is decidedly and fundamentally a fabrication.
Do you fear the scale becoming the predominant or is it meant to be?
I am aware that there is a certain 'how did you do that' factor to the work, but I think that once the viewer surmounts that and examines the work itself, there are consistent undercurrents structuring the work that allow these other operations to become apparent. The work is laboured and intensive and warrants a degree of close examination and scrutiny. The scale of the work does as I said earlier enforce the viewer to recalibrate their eye, to be drawn into the structure of the work, the mark-making, the topography. I have tried to emphasise the mark making in the work, to ensure that there is an awareness that it is very much a made thing you are looking at, and fundamentally not a photograph, I am not trying to engage in an association with photography as such, but the work does have a dislocated relationship to the camera in that the images are all sourced from the internet and that they are not (at least the vast majority of them are not) places I have actually visited. There is an element to the works that situates them within a debate about the 'screen' and shifts of meaning, how we construct and deconstruct ourselves within the world, within the context of nationhood and wider society. The drawings allow the viewer to become submersive, to take a metaphysical leap of imagination into the world depicted, but that leap is also only to do with your own particular relationship to that space. Where you are as a viewer relative to your place in space and time is fundamentally important to the operations of the work itself.
Conceptually: The work forces me to acknowledge my lack of “knowing” in relation to these places (indeed I only knew of 1)…I have a feeling though there is a further level of “knowing” or “seeing” that Im missing – something socio-political perhaps?! Is this the case?
I have perhaps answered that in the earlier questions, but to clarify, I think that all drawing is in some way seeking out a knowledge or an enquiry into the world, it seeks to delineate space and provides a mechanism for processing ideas about the world and our relationship to it that can occasionally become overwhelming or perhaps are unthought-of. There is a presumption that the world we inhabit is a solid entity, that it exists outside of our control and although it is true that to an extent we are fundamentally 'controlled' beings - our operations within the world are contained within particular socio political and environmental constraints. - what I am seeking to define is that the world is very much constructed, it is a fabrication made by ourselves to serve our own ends. There is a humanistic element to the work, in that we are shown to be objectively looking at spaces, which are not framed within a technological or electronic meta-narrative, it is a world made human and fragile, reduced to basic materials, there is a sympathy of means within each of the places depicted that allows the viewer to dislocate themselves from their own sense of being, to immerse themselves in the particular spaces which are made emphatically human. The work is in a wider sense about your own jurisdictions and place within the world; it manipulates physical and psychological shifts in scale to facilitate an engagement and awareness of the world which is unencumbered by a political agenda. The drawings are of course landscapes and the idea of landscape art has always had very specific political associations, to do with nationality or nationhood. Artists have utilised landscape and their work has been used intentionally or not, to formulate imaginative or romantic associations which can drive a nationalistic political narrative. With my work I am not interested in the pomp or the bombast of place, I want to disassociate my work from any nationalistic tendency, it emphatically aims to sit outside the context of nationhood but I am aware that it does so by conversely having an obtuse relationship to those kinds of ideologies.
How does this conceptual interact with the perceptual in your work and how does this affect longevity of your work and the relationship with your audience?
The conceptual premise of the work is something that is perhaps not readily apparent and I don't always feel that it is a particularly necessary element in looking at the work. The fact that the works in the show were all chosen because they were based on cities located on geographical lines of longitude or latitude was not outlined in the show, I had exhibited the works before and within the titles of the works were the geographical coordinates of each place. In this show the titles of the work consisted of the names of the places so it wasn't particularly important within the context of this show that these works were conceived with that framework in mind. The audience can have a direct and submersive experience of 'looking' at the work, which may or may not instigate ideas about the wider conceptual premise, but the works themselves are intentionally democratic in that they don't enforce their conceptual premise on the viewer, you can engage with the works on a superficial level and just enjoy they are made objects and that there is some sense of appreciation or function in just that process itself.
If I found any flaw in the show as a whole (for me!) it was the lack of text and/or artist statements. Do you feel it necessary to explain your own work using text or an artist statement? Why or why not?
I don't think that the work needs a great degree of explanation; the amount of time in general that people spend looking at a work can be quite minimal. With the act of looking it doesn't necessarily follow that something is 'seen', there can be all kinds of other thoughts fore fronted when we engage in a work, and I am not trying to be dictatorial with how people should or should not view the work. There is a consistency of engagement when people do see the works though that warrants close examination elicits a very particular response. I don't feel that the audience as such are particularly missing out on an element of the work if they are unaware of the conceptual premise behind the work. It is for me enough that the work functions in a particular way and allows the viewer to scrutinise the work and to engage with the work.
Do you think your work sits in well with the title of the show? Why?
There is certainly a harshness of means or directness in my work which is encapsulated by the title of the show. My work is in one sense about controlling the viewer’s perspective, about actualising a relationship within a series of physical and psychological shifts; it is explicitly non-imaginative, plodding and methodical. The title of the show in some sense seemed to mirror the material elements of my work, which I found quite funny. It can perhaps be viewed as work which is a bit 'thick', most certainly turgid and definitely lacking in oils.
Is there something about your art that you think is important that viewers generally overlook or misunderstand?
Although there is a conceptual premise behind the work this isn't always apparent, I think the one thing that people tend to overlook are the political aspects to the work, which are layered into the associative elements of the work but which for me are fundamentally a part of the structure of the work as a whole. I am not trying to be bombastic or to specify one or another political consensus but I think that in a broader sense my work tries to look at the world as a whole without recourse to nationalist or specific political agendas. Although the worlds depicted are almost entirely devoid of people they are also very much populated and I think because of this there is great deal of empathy in the work, there a great similarities in the structure and topography of each place and those similarities tend to outweigh the differences.
Given that you have framed pieces before (eg Claremorris Open 2011) but largely at present your pieces are unframed, is this a deliberate decision and why?
One of the key operations in the work is for me that sense of intimacy which you fundamentally and for a variety of reasons do not get if the work is behind glass. I have had works framed and there is a physical and ideological rupture between the viewer and the work which means that the work is in a sense compromised by the reflective surface, which acts as another screen or layer of meaning between the work and the audience. I have made a larger piece of work (Hall of Mirrors, Versailles) which deliberately brought those issues into play, but I find that the tiny works require no disruption in your ability to engage with the work and in which there is something inherently fragile about having that proximity or closeness to the surface.
Your current work is, as you have stated, started to get even smaller, why is that?
Again it started more out of a process of experimentation than anything. I was intrigued as to how coherent you could make a piece of work, and it still to be visually expansive in the same sense, with the same intensity or density of mark making and the same or similar clarity of vision in the rendering of the material. Also I guess it is a time based issue in that the even tinier works are somewhat quicker relatively to produce, although they can still take a day or two to complete. I think those shifts in scale are fundamentally important and that in some sense the work exists behind the surface, the audience is projected into the work, the psychological spaces in the work are fundamentally expansive and I very much enjoy that control or manipulation if you like of the audiences perceptions and perceptive abilities.
Who or what do you think is the most important influence in your art?
I don’t think that I have direct influences with the work I am producing at the moment, I was always intrigued by the perceptual and psychological positioning of the Minimalists such as Judd or Flavin, and how the audience becomes proximate to a work, relative to their own subject hood and jurisdictions. I recall seeing an exhibition at the Kroller Muller Museum of Van Gogh drawings which contained a great number of his late landscape drawings which consistently blew me away, there are a number of works I guess that I have seen that in some way inform my drawing practice, there was beautiful Rembrandt drawing I saw in Manchester a while ago, I think there are some artists such as Paul Chiappe or Richard Forster who have similar concerns, my tutor at University Keir Smith was a big influence on the way that an artist should think about work and the repercussions of making work within a given context. The miniature works I am producing at the moment have come about over perhaps a twenty year period via various means and processes of working, there has been a long and slow gestation both in form and ideas which have brought me to this work and I am consistently looking for new experiences and new ideas within art to broaden and formulate ideas within my own practice.
What role do you think current technologies & social networking tools (like Flickr, Facebook, LinkedIn etc) together with the near ubiquity of digital imaging are having in the making, distribution, critical dialogue and marketing of art? What do you use & why?
I use Facebook essentially as a networking tool and to promote or make people aware of my work. Each of the drawings I am doing at the moment I am posting images of as I go along, almost like a diary of a journey I have undertaken to complete my current project, which is to produce a miniature drawing of every capital city in the world. There are 196 in total. This is a very arduous task and I have stripped the work down to essential elements in order to have a conversation that encompasses such a variety of consequences or implications. With the project very much at the outset at the moment I am somewhat loathed to elaborate too much on it as I am in the process of producing it and the demands of concentration can become quite intense, it can be easy to become dislocated from that process the outcomes of which will only probably become clearer as that process is completed.
What are your thoughts on education vs autodidacticism in art?
I think art education is consistently misrepresented and viewed as some sort of luxury, whereas from my experience, the opportunity to broaden your awareness, knowledge and insight within a formal academic structure was of fundamental importance to not only my own work but also the majority of colleagues with whom I went to University with. The structures of knowledge and critique, the teaching of formal and practical applications are a valuable and intrinsic part of any art practice. I despair at the idea that art is somehow an inherent capacity which only needs someone to pick up a pencil or a brush and will somehow then magically appear fully formed and coherent. There are of course arguments for and against the institutionalisation of art, which needs structures and support to flourish, it doesn’t occur in isolation as with any other sphere of human activity. Art has certain processes and strictures, it is a vast resource of activity that encompasses all aspects of the human condition from the rational to the irrational, the political to the benign and it is a powerful tool for engagement and empathy that is without equal. Therefore it fundamentally needs those intellectual resources and structures to inform its activity and to facilitate its means to operate.
I don't have and have never really felt the need for a specific studio space. The main focus of my practice are the miniature works and other than a flat table top and decent lighting there are no other real criteria. The impetus for the work - the shifts in scale - came a few years ago just out of curiosity more than anything. I had a photograph I had taken of a group of people walking down a road which I decided on a whim to try to scale down. In a previous incarnation I used to be a printer/graphic designer so I was used to looking closely at images, how they were constructed essentially out of four colours in a series of dots always intrigued me, the idea of bringing something down in scale was more of an experiment than anything else. I had done a number of works where the opposite had occurred, I was curious as to how those shifts in scale would operate at a miniscule size with both the image and also in a material sense.
Tell me about your process (I can’t envisage how you work to such a scale), where things begin, how they evolve etc. Is there a vision for a body of work or do you work on singular pieces?
I only ever have one piece of work going at a time. The mainstay of my work is derived from photographs which are gridded out usually to approximately 1 inch squares, this matrix is then lightly redrawn on whatever material I am using, be it paper or primed wood or board. The surface operates in different ways depending on my aims and intentions. A paper surface is fundamentally different to work on than a primed oak/board surface. The ways, in which the qualities of line and material operate, the mattness or sheen of the pencil, the chalk and the crayon, the contrasting qualities of waxiness and opaqueness have totally different systems of operation dependant on the material surface. What I am attempting to do with each piece is to reconcile these different qualities of material, the sheen and opacity, into a kind of layered engineered quality, I work over and work back each material and mark to formulate something recognisable tonally and structurally as the thing I am trying to render.
The main impetus of my recent work has been the cityscapes. These arose out of a small work I did on paper of the view from the top of one of the twin towers of the World Trade Centre in New York. I remember having completed it and being quite startled by what it actually did, both in subject matter and in those kinds of shifts in perspective. I had a bit of a 'eureka' moment with it.
The subject matter for my current work has arisen out of a consistency of aim and intention over the last few years. My first forays into shifts in scale where determined I suppose purely by experiments in the manipulation of scale and materials. The cityscapes derived from an interest in the geo political and spatial relationships of making a drawing or constructing an image and a kind of inquiry into the consequences of line and demarcation. I was interested in the wider political implications of line both in a practical and philosophical sense. The works in the exhibition at Ormston House were part of a series of works (currently on display in Tullamore) which were views of cities based along the Prime Meridian and the Equator. I was interested in how the ideological consequences of making a line on a piece of paper essentially becomes a process of drawing a distinction between one thing and another, becoming not only a mark in space but also the separation of two separate spaces, a delineation or perhaps the rendering of a particular jurisdiction. It is almost as if the topography of the world can be seen as a symptom of that process, which is of course taught at an early age and becomes a way of negotiating temporal and spatial qualities and also an exercise in essentially possessing and quantifying a position in the world. These things have evolved over time into the world we know (or think we know) and operate in today. There is an international consensus in the structure of time down to fractions of a millisecond. This is a consensus which has been brought about by a process of knowledge and also a consensus of political power relationships. Our awareness of time and space, our geopolitical relationships are all quantified by relics of a very specific political agenda which dictates where we are in time and space. It is these things that I am interested in, how we become aware of those relationships and how those relationships can be altered or made apparent. How they are in some respects essential to our functioning as a society but how they are also in very particular ways a very arbitrary grid that we impose upon the world.
How long would it take you to complete a piece?
The works can take a number of days to complete. They are methodical and the particular process tends to eliminate any sense of gesture or spontaneity. They are very molecular and basic, each one is I think a construction, built piece by piece and these processes do tend to mirror the ways in which the city or the work itself is constructed, geometrically, methodically, over time. They are intentionally laboured, having specifically durational element to them, so that the drawings, although tiny can be seen to be made and to the viewer to have gone through a very apparent process.
In the show your pieces stand out for me personally in two ways:
Scale (there is no getting away from it!!) – And how this engages the viewer: I found it fascinating in terms of how I was drawn into the pieces. How important is the “scale” and why?
The works sits, for me, into the context of a wider narrative inquiring into relativities of scale and proximity. A piece of art consists of a series of relational and psychological shifts or narratives that are informed by both the artist/the art and the relationship that the audience has with the thing that is seen. It is about where you are as a viewer in relation to the particular place; the works are about a composite knowledge of those locations which are very specific, geographically, socially and politically. The shift in scale does something quite peculiar psychologically, it allows the viewer a particular kind of focus, it allows the mind to recalibrate and it allows the eye to examine; to be drawn into the work, to go a journey with the drawing and to become aware of the topography and the geometry of a place whilst all the time being conscious of the work being 'drawn'. The surface of work functions as a kind of 'screen', a lens within the world; it becomes another layer of information relating to a whole series of operations concerning the structure of the world and my own particular enquiry into it. I have made larger works which fundamentally don't do the same thing in the same way, I am happy that with the small works I have found a mechanism, a way in which the viewer can engage in a relationship with the works and which have a very particular process of operation both materially and psychologically. I think that by miniaturising the world, it becomes in some sense, a manageable entity. There are spatial and temporal relationships that occur that we make considerable presumptions about, but they function as part of a wider socio political narrative brought into being for very particular means and riddled with all kinds of ambiguities and historical baggage. I try to make work that is stripped of metaphor; it is very specific work, unburdened by any kind of narrative fictions. There is in some sense a political agenda contextualising the work, but the work itself is also non-political or perhaps apolitical. It seeks to define the particular places depicted with a certain amount of empathy, to be non-judgemental both culturally and socially. It is perhaps too about the triumph of capitalism and nation building, but what it also tries to show is that these places and this world is very much a 'made' entity and therefore can be fundamentally redesigned, or re-made, the drawings show that the world is decidedly and fundamentally a fabrication.
Do you fear the scale becoming the predominant or is it meant to be?
I am aware that there is a certain 'how did you do that' factor to the work, but I think that once the viewer surmounts that and examines the work itself, there are consistent undercurrents structuring the work that allow these other operations to become apparent. The work is laboured and intensive and warrants a degree of close examination and scrutiny. The scale of the work does as I said earlier enforce the viewer to recalibrate their eye, to be drawn into the structure of the work, the mark-making, the topography. I have tried to emphasise the mark making in the work, to ensure that there is an awareness that it is very much a made thing you are looking at, and fundamentally not a photograph, I am not trying to engage in an association with photography as such, but the work does have a dislocated relationship to the camera in that the images are all sourced from the internet and that they are not (at least the vast majority of them are not) places I have actually visited. There is an element to the works that situates them within a debate about the 'screen' and shifts of meaning, how we construct and deconstruct ourselves within the world, within the context of nationhood and wider society. The drawings allow the viewer to become submersive, to take a metaphysical leap of imagination into the world depicted, but that leap is also only to do with your own particular relationship to that space. Where you are as a viewer relative to your place in space and time is fundamentally important to the operations of the work itself.
Conceptually: The work forces me to acknowledge my lack of “knowing” in relation to these places (indeed I only knew of 1)…I have a feeling though there is a further level of “knowing” or “seeing” that Im missing – something socio-political perhaps?! Is this the case?
I have perhaps answered that in the earlier questions, but to clarify, I think that all drawing is in some way seeking out a knowledge or an enquiry into the world, it seeks to delineate space and provides a mechanism for processing ideas about the world and our relationship to it that can occasionally become overwhelming or perhaps are unthought-of. There is a presumption that the world we inhabit is a solid entity, that it exists outside of our control and although it is true that to an extent we are fundamentally 'controlled' beings - our operations within the world are contained within particular socio political and environmental constraints. - what I am seeking to define is that the world is very much constructed, it is a fabrication made by ourselves to serve our own ends. There is a humanistic element to the work, in that we are shown to be objectively looking at spaces, which are not framed within a technological or electronic meta-narrative, it is a world made human and fragile, reduced to basic materials, there is a sympathy of means within each of the places depicted that allows the viewer to dislocate themselves from their own sense of being, to immerse themselves in the particular spaces which are made emphatically human. The work is in a wider sense about your own jurisdictions and place within the world; it manipulates physical and psychological shifts in scale to facilitate an engagement and awareness of the world which is unencumbered by a political agenda. The drawings are of course landscapes and the idea of landscape art has always had very specific political associations, to do with nationality or nationhood. Artists have utilised landscape and their work has been used intentionally or not, to formulate imaginative or romantic associations which can drive a nationalistic political narrative. With my work I am not interested in the pomp or the bombast of place, I want to disassociate my work from any nationalistic tendency, it emphatically aims to sit outside the context of nationhood but I am aware that it does so by conversely having an obtuse relationship to those kinds of ideologies.
How does this conceptual interact with the perceptual in your work and how does this affect longevity of your work and the relationship with your audience?
The conceptual premise of the work is something that is perhaps not readily apparent and I don't always feel that it is a particularly necessary element in looking at the work. The fact that the works in the show were all chosen because they were based on cities located on geographical lines of longitude or latitude was not outlined in the show, I had exhibited the works before and within the titles of the works were the geographical coordinates of each place. In this show the titles of the work consisted of the names of the places so it wasn't particularly important within the context of this show that these works were conceived with that framework in mind. The audience can have a direct and submersive experience of 'looking' at the work, which may or may not instigate ideas about the wider conceptual premise, but the works themselves are intentionally democratic in that they don't enforce their conceptual premise on the viewer, you can engage with the works on a superficial level and just enjoy they are made objects and that there is some sense of appreciation or function in just that process itself.
If I found any flaw in the show as a whole (for me!) it was the lack of text and/or artist statements. Do you feel it necessary to explain your own work using text or an artist statement? Why or why not?
I don't think that the work needs a great degree of explanation; the amount of time in general that people spend looking at a work can be quite minimal. With the act of looking it doesn't necessarily follow that something is 'seen', there can be all kinds of other thoughts fore fronted when we engage in a work, and I am not trying to be dictatorial with how people should or should not view the work. There is a consistency of engagement when people do see the works though that warrants close examination elicits a very particular response. I don't feel that the audience as such are particularly missing out on an element of the work if they are unaware of the conceptual premise behind the work. It is for me enough that the work functions in a particular way and allows the viewer to scrutinise the work and to engage with the work.
Do you think your work sits in well with the title of the show? Why?
There is certainly a harshness of means or directness in my work which is encapsulated by the title of the show. My work is in one sense about controlling the viewer’s perspective, about actualising a relationship within a series of physical and psychological shifts; it is explicitly non-imaginative, plodding and methodical. The title of the show in some sense seemed to mirror the material elements of my work, which I found quite funny. It can perhaps be viewed as work which is a bit 'thick', most certainly turgid and definitely lacking in oils.
Is there something about your art that you think is important that viewers generally overlook or misunderstand?
Although there is a conceptual premise behind the work this isn't always apparent, I think the one thing that people tend to overlook are the political aspects to the work, which are layered into the associative elements of the work but which for me are fundamentally a part of the structure of the work as a whole. I am not trying to be bombastic or to specify one or another political consensus but I think that in a broader sense my work tries to look at the world as a whole without recourse to nationalist or specific political agendas. Although the worlds depicted are almost entirely devoid of people they are also very much populated and I think because of this there is great deal of empathy in the work, there a great similarities in the structure and topography of each place and those similarities tend to outweigh the differences.
Given that you have framed pieces before (eg Claremorris Open 2011) but largely at present your pieces are unframed, is this a deliberate decision and why?
One of the key operations in the work is for me that sense of intimacy which you fundamentally and for a variety of reasons do not get if the work is behind glass. I have had works framed and there is a physical and ideological rupture between the viewer and the work which means that the work is in a sense compromised by the reflective surface, which acts as another screen or layer of meaning between the work and the audience. I have made a larger piece of work (Hall of Mirrors, Versailles) which deliberately brought those issues into play, but I find that the tiny works require no disruption in your ability to engage with the work and in which there is something inherently fragile about having that proximity or closeness to the surface.
Your current work is, as you have stated, started to get even smaller, why is that?
Again it started more out of a process of experimentation than anything. I was intrigued as to how coherent you could make a piece of work, and it still to be visually expansive in the same sense, with the same intensity or density of mark making and the same or similar clarity of vision in the rendering of the material. Also I guess it is a time based issue in that the even tinier works are somewhat quicker relatively to produce, although they can still take a day or two to complete. I think those shifts in scale are fundamentally important and that in some sense the work exists behind the surface, the audience is projected into the work, the psychological spaces in the work are fundamentally expansive and I very much enjoy that control or manipulation if you like of the audiences perceptions and perceptive abilities.
Who or what do you think is the most important influence in your art?
I don’t think that I have direct influences with the work I am producing at the moment, I was always intrigued by the perceptual and psychological positioning of the Minimalists such as Judd or Flavin, and how the audience becomes proximate to a work, relative to their own subject hood and jurisdictions. I recall seeing an exhibition at the Kroller Muller Museum of Van Gogh drawings which contained a great number of his late landscape drawings which consistently blew me away, there are a number of works I guess that I have seen that in some way inform my drawing practice, there was beautiful Rembrandt drawing I saw in Manchester a while ago, I think there are some artists such as Paul Chiappe or Richard Forster who have similar concerns, my tutor at University Keir Smith was a big influence on the way that an artist should think about work and the repercussions of making work within a given context. The miniature works I am producing at the moment have come about over perhaps a twenty year period via various means and processes of working, there has been a long and slow gestation both in form and ideas which have brought me to this work and I am consistently looking for new experiences and new ideas within art to broaden and formulate ideas within my own practice.
What role do you think current technologies & social networking tools (like Flickr, Facebook, LinkedIn etc) together with the near ubiquity of digital imaging are having in the making, distribution, critical dialogue and marketing of art? What do you use & why?
I use Facebook essentially as a networking tool and to promote or make people aware of my work. Each of the drawings I am doing at the moment I am posting images of as I go along, almost like a diary of a journey I have undertaken to complete my current project, which is to produce a miniature drawing of every capital city in the world. There are 196 in total. This is a very arduous task and I have stripped the work down to essential elements in order to have a conversation that encompasses such a variety of consequences or implications. With the project very much at the outset at the moment I am somewhat loathed to elaborate too much on it as I am in the process of producing it and the demands of concentration can become quite intense, it can be easy to become dislocated from that process the outcomes of which will only probably become clearer as that process is completed.
What are your thoughts on education vs autodidacticism in art?
I think art education is consistently misrepresented and viewed as some sort of luxury, whereas from my experience, the opportunity to broaden your awareness, knowledge and insight within a formal academic structure was of fundamental importance to not only my own work but also the majority of colleagues with whom I went to University with. The structures of knowledge and critique, the teaching of formal and practical applications are a valuable and intrinsic part of any art practice. I despair at the idea that art is somehow an inherent capacity which only needs someone to pick up a pencil or a brush and will somehow then magically appear fully formed and coherent. There are of course arguments for and against the institutionalisation of art, which needs structures and support to flourish, it doesn’t occur in isolation as with any other sphere of human activity. Art has certain processes and strictures, it is a vast resource of activity that encompasses all aspects of the human condition from the rational to the irrational, the political to the benign and it is a powerful tool for engagement and empathy that is without equal. Therefore it fundamentally needs those intellectual resources and structures to inform its activity and to facilitate its means to operate.
Chris Leach’s Miniature Cities
As part of his ongoing drawing project “The World”, Leach focuses on creating miniature drawings of locations around the world such as Amsterdam (The Netherlands), Rabat (Morroco), and even Micronesia’s own Palikir.
The typical size of a drawing is around 40 millimeters width and 30 millimeters height. Leach mostly uses a pencil and a scalpel as his drawing tools, and a special tool to polish the outcome once the drawing is done. The canvas is rabbit skin gesso stretched on a tiny block of oak.
The artist chooses to depict in miniatures outdoors scenes with an emphasis on cities, which comments on the vastness of these locations in comparison to the human experience. We suddenly see the vastness of the world as a tiny insight. Since the drawings are still quite detailed it may feel like there’s no room in there for us humans. Elizabeth Hatz of EV+a Matters writes about this aspect of Leach’s work and claims that “the work makes you enter a world through the compression of your mind but the expansion of your senses.“
mydailymagazine.com/chris-leachs-miniature-cities/
The typical size of a drawing is around 40 millimeters width and 30 millimeters height. Leach mostly uses a pencil and a scalpel as his drawing tools, and a special tool to polish the outcome once the drawing is done. The canvas is rabbit skin gesso stretched on a tiny block of oak.
The artist chooses to depict in miniatures outdoors scenes with an emphasis on cities, which comments on the vastness of these locations in comparison to the human experience. We suddenly see the vastness of the world as a tiny insight. Since the drawings are still quite detailed it may feel like there’s no room in there for us humans. Elizabeth Hatz of EV+a Matters writes about this aspect of Leach’s work and claims that “the work makes you enter a world through the compression of your mind but the expansion of your senses.“
mydailymagazine.com/chris-leachs-miniature-cities/
A documentary on the Find Art Project in Castlebar which ran from 29th March until 26th April 2014.
A series of 10 miniature drawings located in around the town.
Chris Leach‘On the Threshold of Recognition’,
Visual Artists’ News Sheet, Sept/Oct 2012
by Joanne Laws
Ballina Arts Centre
July 5 – July 29 2012
When asked to review this exhibition I thought it necessary to come prepared, so within my notebook I concealed a magnifying glass. I knew little about the history of miniature painting, other than vague correlations with Persian and Ottoman empires, and wasn’t overly enthused about learning more. I certainly couldn’t envisage what contemporary drawing of this genre could offer me, other than a serious case of eye-strain. However, since viewing the exhibition and attending the artist’s public talk, I have thought about this work quite a lot, ruminating on the dense relationship between visuality and meaning, wrapped up in my own experience of ‘close-looking’.
Although photographic in their initial appearance, Leach’s series of monochromatic miniature drawings retain a humanly-crafted appeal. The body of work took three years to complete, testifying to the labour-intensity of this detailed process. Time was invested by the viewer too, attracted ever inward by the disruption of scale, for a more intimate reading. While moving through the space, I kept referring to the titles list to illuminate the content. I became conscious of triggered ripples of associated meanings, my own ‘threshold of recognition’. This established a slow pace for looking (using my surreptitious magnifying glass) and perpetuated a degree of submersion.
The exhibition conveyed a strong sense of narrative, executed in a linear configuration across the four walls of the gallery space. I first encountered a drawing depicting a panoramic view from the summit of the World Trade Centre. This frozen moment – a monumental ‘presence’ re-enacted – is loaded with meaning from the contemporary vantage point. Inscriptions of lapsed time, monuments, war and the slippages of binary terms and their prescribed meanings – good / evil, ally / enemy, local / global, past / present – slowly infiltrated my reading of the exhibition as the sequential narrative panned from the general to the particular with the upmost dexterity.
Cartography and geographical division was the focus of 15 drawings on primed wood, entitled ‘Meridian Series’ and ‘Equatorial Series’. These tiny yet surprisingly expansive cityscapes depicted the capital cities of countries which span the Greenwich Meridian from North to South Pole and the Equator respectively, with geographical co-ordinates constituting each title. Mounted separately on small blocks, each drawing protruded slightly from the wall: a sculptural gesture that was further evident in the thick layer of gesso which enveloped the edges of the supports so seductively.
The fact that the artist has never visited most of these cities reveals the conceptual premise of the work. Pre-conceptions of place through media construct, photographic imagery as digitised meta-data and distribution via satellite and internet technology (eg Google Earth), create an ambiguous and perplexing present-day scenario which simultaneously allows the world to be ‘superficially small and known’[i], while remaining fundamentally unknown.
From this global perspective, the narrative then moved towards the local, a trajectory which became increasingly nostalgic. A series of framed drawings depicted scenes of habitation and construction in various locations from Bolivia to Iran. Some sites were perceived as politically charged, while others denoted the seemingly everyday. The artist seemed to be querying how these systems of association – between visual information, place and meaning – evolve. While I enjoyed the overall curation, glass became an obstacle when looking closely at the framed works, though it was easier in the only piece mounted on black.
My reading of The Lovel Radio Telescope at Jodrell Bank – a drawing of satellite dish situated on a hill in Cheshire – became animated when the artist spoke about his childhood, and his memory of cycling around it on his BMX. For a child of the ‘ET generation’, extra-terrestrial imagination knows no bounds. Caravan sites, dart players and ventriloquists also featured, encapsulating a Butlin-esque era that engaged me on an emotional level.
Having reviewed a number of drawing exhibitions lately, it has occurred to me that this renewed curatorial interest in drawing may constitute a desire to reconnect with the mind of the creative individual, a figure who has been momentarily relinquished in the contemporary discourse surrounding revivals of collectivity within multi-media environments. Drawing as a direct mode of ordering thought can reveal unique, flawed and fragile things which evoke empathy within the viewer.
The artist spoke philosophically about his unresolved thinking regarding ‘meaning’ in his work, and also about the role of the artist as observer or narrator. From my perspective, the artist, engaged in the act of perpetual looking, can draw the audience in, as Leach does, magnifying those complex realities that remain unchallenged, highlighting unchartered thresholds between the established and the yet to be discovered.
[i] D.H Lawrence, ‘New Mexico’, 1928, in The Spell of New Mexico, Tony Hillerman (Ed.), (University of New Mexico Press, 1984) p 29 30
http://joannelaws.wordpress.com/2012/08/31/review-chris-leach-on-the-threshold-of-recognition-visual-artists-news-sheet-septoct-issue/#more-500
Visual Artists’ News Sheet, Sept/Oct 2012
by Joanne Laws
Ballina Arts Centre
July 5 – July 29 2012
When asked to review this exhibition I thought it necessary to come prepared, so within my notebook I concealed a magnifying glass. I knew little about the history of miniature painting, other than vague correlations with Persian and Ottoman empires, and wasn’t overly enthused about learning more. I certainly couldn’t envisage what contemporary drawing of this genre could offer me, other than a serious case of eye-strain. However, since viewing the exhibition and attending the artist’s public talk, I have thought about this work quite a lot, ruminating on the dense relationship between visuality and meaning, wrapped up in my own experience of ‘close-looking’.
Although photographic in their initial appearance, Leach’s series of monochromatic miniature drawings retain a humanly-crafted appeal. The body of work took three years to complete, testifying to the labour-intensity of this detailed process. Time was invested by the viewer too, attracted ever inward by the disruption of scale, for a more intimate reading. While moving through the space, I kept referring to the titles list to illuminate the content. I became conscious of triggered ripples of associated meanings, my own ‘threshold of recognition’. This established a slow pace for looking (using my surreptitious magnifying glass) and perpetuated a degree of submersion.
The exhibition conveyed a strong sense of narrative, executed in a linear configuration across the four walls of the gallery space. I first encountered a drawing depicting a panoramic view from the summit of the World Trade Centre. This frozen moment – a monumental ‘presence’ re-enacted – is loaded with meaning from the contemporary vantage point. Inscriptions of lapsed time, monuments, war and the slippages of binary terms and their prescribed meanings – good / evil, ally / enemy, local / global, past / present – slowly infiltrated my reading of the exhibition as the sequential narrative panned from the general to the particular with the upmost dexterity.
Cartography and geographical division was the focus of 15 drawings on primed wood, entitled ‘Meridian Series’ and ‘Equatorial Series’. These tiny yet surprisingly expansive cityscapes depicted the capital cities of countries which span the Greenwich Meridian from North to South Pole and the Equator respectively, with geographical co-ordinates constituting each title. Mounted separately on small blocks, each drawing protruded slightly from the wall: a sculptural gesture that was further evident in the thick layer of gesso which enveloped the edges of the supports so seductively.
The fact that the artist has never visited most of these cities reveals the conceptual premise of the work. Pre-conceptions of place through media construct, photographic imagery as digitised meta-data and distribution via satellite and internet technology (eg Google Earth), create an ambiguous and perplexing present-day scenario which simultaneously allows the world to be ‘superficially small and known’[i], while remaining fundamentally unknown.
From this global perspective, the narrative then moved towards the local, a trajectory which became increasingly nostalgic. A series of framed drawings depicted scenes of habitation and construction in various locations from Bolivia to Iran. Some sites were perceived as politically charged, while others denoted the seemingly everyday. The artist seemed to be querying how these systems of association – between visual information, place and meaning – evolve. While I enjoyed the overall curation, glass became an obstacle when looking closely at the framed works, though it was easier in the only piece mounted on black.
My reading of The Lovel Radio Telescope at Jodrell Bank – a drawing of satellite dish situated on a hill in Cheshire – became animated when the artist spoke about his childhood, and his memory of cycling around it on his BMX. For a child of the ‘ET generation’, extra-terrestrial imagination knows no bounds. Caravan sites, dart players and ventriloquists also featured, encapsulating a Butlin-esque era that engaged me on an emotional level.
Having reviewed a number of drawing exhibitions lately, it has occurred to me that this renewed curatorial interest in drawing may constitute a desire to reconnect with the mind of the creative individual, a figure who has been momentarily relinquished in the contemporary discourse surrounding revivals of collectivity within multi-media environments. Drawing as a direct mode of ordering thought can reveal unique, flawed and fragile things which evoke empathy within the viewer.
The artist spoke philosophically about his unresolved thinking regarding ‘meaning’ in his work, and also about the role of the artist as observer or narrator. From my perspective, the artist, engaged in the act of perpetual looking, can draw the audience in, as Leach does, magnifying those complex realities that remain unchallenged, highlighting unchartered thresholds between the established and the yet to be discovered.
[i] D.H Lawrence, ‘New Mexico’, 1928, in The Spell of New Mexico, Tony Hillerman (Ed.), (University of New Mexico Press, 1984) p 29 30
http://joannelaws.wordpress.com/2012/08/31/review-chris-leach-on-the-threshold-of-recognition-visual-artists-news-sheet-septoct-issue/#more-500