Madonna. Bronze and wood.
Madonna is a response to a resolutely secular world that seems bereft of spirituality.
I started work on this sculpture in 1984 and it is still unfinished.
The original notion was that the sculpture was a doorway that links a secular world to a spiritual world. The doorway is a basic grid shape with the recessed spaces filled with bronze panels of fish and other marine creatures. The image of the fish was an early symbol for Christ and my depiction of a multitude of fish is an acknowledgement of divinity in all of us. The wooden grid is overwhelmed by the fish spilling out from the door. Liminal events like doors imply the spaces they are linking but I have never quite known what is on either side of the doors. So I feel I need to make something to describe these spaces. But what? Maybe though there is not a progression of spaces. Maybe the doors are simply an event. Maybe all I need to do is cover a floor with shingle from a beach? Shingle that has drifted in places so the floor is irregular? Maybe the footsteps in the shingle are integral to the sculpture….Umm…
Incidentally most of the wood in this sculpture came from recycled vats that once stored Corio whisky (Australia’s finest whisky perhaps… best swigged directly from the bottle whilst under a bridge). When cut the oak has a wonderful aroma! I rather like the idea of an industrial whiskey vat being put to a better use.
‘In the Shadow of the New Republic’. Bronze, carved wood, steel.
Shortly after leaving Chelsea College of Art in 1974 I went to Australia. I had £50, I knew nobody and I was desperate for work. After six months of casual labouring I managed to find work in a nascent university in Geelong in the state of Victoria. I was thrilled at the prospect of what I imagined would be a sinecure in civilised surroundings. What a fool I was to imagine that universities were immune to political bickering.
The Art Department at Deakin University was run by a man who should never been put in charge of a university art school. It was the most awful place to work with a department driven by schism, regular purges and denunciations. I worked at Deakin for six years and I really grew up there I suppose. Looking back now I regret that I was simply too naive to realise that what was happening was not ‘normal’ but a complete aberration.
To document the experience of being in the middle of a profoundly dystopian world I channelled two giants of twentieth century culture – Francis Bacon and George Orwell. Both of them in their different ways provided me with a kind of template of how to proceed.
This sculpture was made two years after I left Deakin and is an attempt to describe how I felt at the time. The act of making the sculpture excised the ghosts and helped me regain my equilibrium. The sculpture is made in bronze and carved Australian wood. The cloth under the crowing cock is huon pine that was salvaged from a church. The wood on the top of the chair was shattered in a lightning strike.
‘The Gates of Jerusalem’. Steel, wax.
I constructed this sculpture from 2mm mild steel in the old Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop building. I didn’t do any drawings for it at all – I just winged it. Fortunately it came together as I had seen it in my mind’s eye. Sadly I didn’t have any money to protect it from the elements and in the end it corroded and was scrapped.
I entitled the sculpture the Gates of Jerusalem. It was a sculpture made from steel and wax and and was over 5m high. It depicts a classical doorway collapsing due to neglect whilst two roosters squabble over the ruins.
I made this during the second intifada. Plus ça change. Simply tragic.
Andrew Kinghorn Sculptor 