Explore through 10 key works

Celloswarm, 2002

Bill Woodrow, 29/05/2019
—

Celloswarm is one of a series of sculptures I started making in the year 2000. The catalyst for making them came from the very gentle and intimate experience of having a swarm of bees covering and hanging from my bare hand, a unique sensation of sound and temperature. The sculptures explore the result of a swarm of bees alighting on and covering an inanimate object. The enveloping swarm thus denying the original function of the object, but in doing so investing it with a very different and animate life.

In the case of Celloswarm there is an immediate connection to sound, one made by people on an instrument made by human hands supplanted by the sound of a living organism quietly going about its business. In conversation the writer Mel Gooding said to me it made him think of Yeats’ poem The Lake Isle of Innisfree, in particular the line — “And live alone in the bee-loud glade“. An indirect connection maybe but one that I enjoy very much.

Spin Dryer with Bicycle Frame, 1981

Edited from an unpublished interview with Keith Patrick, 1996
—

KP: It occurs to me that these pieces form a perfect link between the pseudo-natural objects of the student work — and the idea that rocks on beaches might contain some sort of record — and the much more recent work, where there are more obvious and literary clues that need reassembling or decoding. The means are different, but there is a clear conceptual line. Do you see your own work as having a constant, almost linear, development?

BW: Yes, very much. Sometimes it's hard to see it at the time of making, but in retrospect it's always easy to discover that line. The way I worked — and particularly at that time — it was always a case of one sculpture leading to the next. I'd started by embedding electrical goods into concrete... chipping them out to reveal the fossil. The next step was to dispense with the concrete altogether — possibly because I was already bored with it — and to cut directly into the object itself, to find out what's inside. There's a piece from that time, Tape Recorder, which just has a square section removed and all the bits that came from it are laid out, as in an archaeological dig. That led to works like Hoover Breakdown, where I took the complete thing to bits. And then I added my own version of the hoover, a wooden replica, to see what the relationship was like.

KP: Again, conceptually that's not far removed from the sort of relationship suggested between the photos and real objects of your student work. And the use of the decoy.

BW: Yes. All the time you were having to look at things to decide if they were real, or whether a certain set of components made that object. Quite often the work involved an initial deception, and you were invited to ask why you were being deceived. And Hoover Breakdown led on to a piece made with bicycle frames...

KP: This is the work in which you cut up a bicycle frame and reassembled it as one line?

BW: I cut up a bicycle frame with a hacksaw in such a way as to leave it in one piece, but was able to unfold it into one line just to see what length it made. That was the piece that led to the first cut-out work, which was to remake a bicycle frame from what happened to be the surface skin of a spin-dryer.

KP: That was the winter of 1980-81 and that way of working very quickly brought you to wider notice. You were included in two important shows in 1981: Objects and Sculpture at the ICA/Arnolfini and the big sculpture survey at the Whitechapel, curated by Nicholas Serota and Sandy Nairne. It was those two shows, and maybe The Sculpture Show two years later, that came to define a new generation of British sculpture. And your work was very much central to that. Did that feel to you like a moment of discovery?

BW: I really enjoyed the period from the fossil pieces onwards — just for myself, because very few other people saw it. When I made the first cut-out work, I realised the potential. What interested me was that the bicycle frame was still connected to the original material and the original material still had its own identity as a familiar everyday object. I was really excited by that bizarre coupling and wanted to make more and more work like that — which I did very quickly. At that time I felt something really good was going on, but it was only after six months or a year that I realised the potential of the work to comment on those other areas of interest.. which goes back to the question you asked earlier about a social or political element.

Bunker Mule, 1995

Edited from an interview with Roman Sheppard Dawson for 1 Granary no.4, 2017
—

1G: I’d like to know a little bit about Bunker Mule, for the peace project in Denmark.

BW: That was an interesting project. Artists from different countries throughout the world were invited to interact with the Nazi bunkers that are found all the way down the Danish coast. These bunkers are still there because they cannot be removed, not because they’re listed or conserved but because they’re so strong. The only way you could remove them is to blow them up, but that would ruin the beaches they’re on as there would be millions of pieces of sharp concrete left on the beaches as a result. The bunkers are amazing structures not without architectural interest, because of their pure functionality — quite weird.

Each artist was given a location and it was only after seeing the different places I had been offered that I began to finalise what I wanted to do. My idea was to turn them into something that deflates their original purpose. I had thought donkeys on the beach, but then I thought mules because mules can’t breed. Turn these Nazi things into something that can’t reproduce. The Mules are kind of fun things to look at. There were three or four bunkers that I put the head and tail of a mule on. The idea was that after the project, the work would be removed. The local commune or district that it was in, decided they wanted to keep them and they’re still there.

Tobago Navigator, 2005

Edited from an interview with Richard Deacon 23.11.2005
—

RD: Where do these animal skulls come from?

BW: I’d been looking at some deer skulls and I got very interested in the way they were put together and their form. I tried as a starting point with my ceramic experiments, to make a deer skull, or parts of it, and that got me interested even more, in how the skull went together, perhaps because the one I had wasn’t complete. So I spent quite a lot of time at the Horniman Museum, South London looking at skulls and drawing them and then came back to the studio and tried to make skulls, not always directly from the drawing but from my memory. I don’t think if a bone or skull specialist saw these skulls they would say; that’s a so-and-so, that’s a particular ape, they’d probably say, that’s a very weird looking skull, in actual fact. But they seem to fit, in your sense of a generic ape skull. So there was that, and at the same time I was trying to get to terms with clay which I hadn’t used before, which was an interesting thing to do. I didn’t find it a particularly easy material. I needed more patience than I had at that time I think, but I learnt to wait and that proved the most important thing, that you had to give it some time. Then I was able to make some of the things that I wanted to make.

RD: The colour bases came after?

BW: Yes, the colour bases came after. I started off by making a whole range of skulls which I really liked just on their own, but on their own they weren’t sculpture, they were just ceramic skulls and I wanted to use them in some way as a component of a sculpture, so the laminated coloured pieces, which I don’t see as bases in your sense of the word, become integral components of the sculpture. They are the other components of the sculpture.

Elephant, 1984

Letter to Lewis Biggs, British Council, 18/07/1985
—

Dear Lewis,

On returning to London, having spent two months working in Toronto, finding my empty studio colder and more uncomfortable than the winter conditions of Canada, the only way for me to avoid chronic depression was to set out to make a sculpture that at minimum would keep me warm and at the best keep me mentally alive, hopefully excited.

I remember thinking, it has to be big, much bigger than anything else I had made before. The idea of an elephant appeared quite rapidly, for obvious reasons I suppose. For one, thing I had no desire to change the scale of anything I made, just make it to what I thought was life size, no measurements or visits to the Zoo, maybe a quick visual reference to an old cover of a copy of the National Geographic. There was no question about making a complete elephant, that seemed a very crass, obvious idea. It would just be the head, with ears, trunk and tusks, mounted colonial fashion, high on the end wall of the studio.

Before the winter I had come across a shutdown car breakers yard in Bermondsey and had salvaged from it maybe fifteen or sixteen car doors and assorted body panels. These had been stacked outside my studio for five or six months and I remember one of the strongest things about them was their colour, especially in the wet weather.

Being the nearest material to hand they were carried into the studio to hopefully become the elephant.

The head was constructed on and around an ironing board which provided an incredibly strong frame because of the triangular nature of its base. It became big, very big, very quickly. The studio was a jagged sea of car doors of all colours and growing out of the centre of them all was this multi-coloured, ear-, trunk-and tusk-less Volvo elephant head. To attach the trunk and tusks I had to get the half completed head into its final position on the wall; well I tried, but it was impossible, it was too big, too heavy and I was very nearly crushed after having managed to almost lift it above my head, So for the first time ever I had to get someone to help me work inside the studio. Generally I am very secretive when working and the idea of people watching or even helping did not appeal at all. It seemed a little like having someone watching in your bedroom! Anyway, it turned out not to be a problem and the head duly acquired trunk and tusks but no ears.

The ears; well; this turned into a very interesting and crucial stage in the making of the sculpture. All attempts to use car panels complete or metal taken from them seemed far from satisfactory. I am not quite sure why, bur the whole thing seemed to become a little bland not only from a point of view of materials but also in content. Anyway, it just so happened that at about the same time as salvaging the car doors, I found in a rubbish skip, a complete set of wall maps, the type used in schools, very large and printed on a strong cloth. Zimbabwe was called Rhodesia and there seemed to be lots of pink bits everywhere so I guess they were discarded for being politically out of date. Rolled up and neatly stacked they stood in the corner of the studio, a difficult material, not exactly forgotten but just waiting. The maps of Africa and South America had an ear shape and a rough symmetry which first suggested their use. Their value in terms of content in shaping how the sculpture developed was not immediately apparent. Africa and South America were/are third world continents, a point, in fact the point, that became more and more important in my reflecting on the work as I made the ears from the maps and attached them to the head.

All along I had wanted to use all the original materials in the sculpture, so that the finished work included all the new things as well as the remains of the original things from which they were made, whether physically attached or not. My thinking about the countries depicted on the maps now started to be mixed in with the problem of what I was going to do with the remains of the car doors.

Africa, America, South America, jungles, deserts, cities, shanty towns, wells, water holes, black soldiers, white soldiers, sunsets, magical dawns, heat, famine, cultures, natural forces, highly armed technology, western civilisation, politics, tribes, revolutions, coups, dwindling forests, beautiful beautiful landscapes, population explosions, advancing medicine, tourist carvings, elegant suburbs, thriving industries, exotic food, dance music, rabid dogs... finally produced a sculpture of an elephant lifting a modern automatic weapon from a water hole. The doors forming the banks of the water hole.

So, anyway Lewis, do you think that the knowledge (deeply embedded in the western psyche, maybe the eastern as well for all I know) of the supposed fact that «elephants never forget» will be of any use to any of us or our children, or their children’s children, or...

Untitled, 1979

Edited from an unpublished interview with Keith Patrick, 1996
—

KP: What were the ideas behind the work at that time? I'm thinking particularly of the ‘archaeological’ pieces, with excavated objects set in concrete.

BW: They came about from looking at fossils on Sunday afternoon trips to the geological museum with the kids. The idea of making a contemporary fossil arose from getting material off the streets. I’d set the objects in concrete and then chip away until they were partially revealed.

KP: Were these pieces addressing wider socio-political issues at any conscious level?

BW: At the time, I don’t think I was considering that consciously. I wasn't thinking about working in a particular way to reveal something about the state of consumerist society. It was based far more on visual considerations, that if I did this it would have a fossil-like appearance. That would be the sort of approach I had... the excitement of finding something like that, of trying to decipher or decode it. Visually it would be a bizarre thing. I wasn't working from any manifesto or philosophy. I was always interested in questions about the state of the world, but I didn't think I could address those kinds of problems through art. I later discovered I was able to do that, but that took a long time — it wasn't at that point. If there was a possibility of reading those early pieces in that way, it wasn't conscious on my part.

Revelator 5, 2006

Bill Woodrow, 05/02/2010
—

The Revelator Series came about as a result of looking at Roman carved heads in the city museum in Luxembourg. A few weeks later, back in my London studio, I decided to see if I could make a Roman head from memory — without the use of any visual aids.

All the heads I had seen in the museum were of bearded males, but because I was working in clay [additive process] I did not put the beards or hair on the head until I had finished the basic head form. [If I had been carving I would have had to start with the beard and hair.] It was at this point of adding the beard that something very unexpected happened — what was just a normal everyday human male head became an iconic, mythical image imbued with a seriousness and historical heritage [or baggage] that wasn't there before. The great general, the prophet, the wise man, the philosopher, the scientist, the intellectual — all males given a supposedly superior but strangely isolated role by the rest of society. They have a gaze that looks past you rather than engages you. I became fascinated by this change and how much it is part of our cultural history and gender makeup.

The sculptural problems now had to be resolved. I had a fired clay head but this in itself for me was just a component not a complete sculpture. Following on from the previous Evaluator Series of sculptures, I used twigs and thin branches to form a skeletal matrix that supported and surrounded the head — isolating it. Next my intuitive response was to make something that responded formally to this matrix, supporting and presenting it in a contemporary way — opposite in material and content -— that emphasised the historical and cultural distance travelled since the very first hand made images of bearded men.

In its final form, the ceramic head and the open linear twig matrix are cast in bronze and the solid enclosed supporting coloured form is laminated wood.

Stuenes Oscillator 1, 2008

Extract from an interview with Margherita Potenza, 2017
—

MP: In 2013-14 you were the subject of a retrospective show at Royal Academy, where visitors could walk through the spectrum of your work, from the cutouts to the beekeeping sculptures. What's your current subject of interest?

BW: I think it's landscape, strangely enough... Since I started going to Norway nearly every year, to the very north, I got interested in landscape as a potential subject. In particular since seeing the aurora borealis for the first time.

MP: Apparently 2017 is the last year the aurora will be in its full brightness, as it then fades away following its natural cycle and will start appearing clearly after ten years.

BW: I hadn't expected it when I saw it. And it was only two or three years later that I decided to make work about it. Not at the time, because it was too powerful... I wanted to let it go and see if it would stay in my head. Then I started to make lots of paintings about it. I think I'm still on that one.

MP: Does climate change have to do with these paintings?

BW: I wasn't thinking of that when making them. The first ones are painted on maps. For me they are an exploration of colours, but they don't represent the aurora in the sense that they are copies of it; they're about it. Have you seen it? This thing happens in the sky above you, and there's this great feeling of... kind of like compression. It's very difficult to be eloquent about it. I was fishing when I saw it, up to my waist in water. It was dark, around midnight, and I felt glued to where I was. I felt part of the Earth. So the paintings are trying to express that. Also, the Norwegian landscape is pretty amazing, once you enter the Arctic circle. You drive for hours and every now and then you pass by a hut, a few kilometers away a group of huts, and after a while a village... There is a geological reason why these specific places are suitable for human settlement, so there's almost a sequence, a history of human development in the landscape. I became really interested in that, visually.

Sting II, 1998

Bill Woodrow, 17/08/2006
—

My first introduction to glass as a possible sculptural material was in 1988 when I was Artist-in-Residence at Pilchuck, near Seattle, USA for two weeks. This short but very concentrated introduction was a revelation and I have used glass as a sculptural component at various times since then, but always having to use a skilled glassmaker to make things for me. This was/is a very expensive process and as such does not allow for experimentation or research. Failure was not really an option. So when I discovered the existence of CIRVA, Marseille, France and was consequently invited to use the facilities there, I was very excited.

I went to CIRVA with some ideas of what I wanted to achieve sculpturally, and had no idea whether it was possible or not. Although I now understand a lot more about the process of glass working, I always try to put the process out of my mind when considering a potential sculptural component. I do not want to be limited by knowing or thinking “Actually it’s not possible to do that”. It is much better to say to the technicians “This is what I want” and then to start the process of trying to achieve the supposedly impossible. This relationship between the artist and the technicians is the most important part of one’s experience at CIRVA. Everything depends on the understanding of what the artist wants, together with the fact that sometimes the artist doesn’t know what they want. This is often the most interesting time with the technicians and the artist both leading each other into unknown territory.

In my particular case there were no unsolvable problems in making my Beekeeper marionette components or finally in the black and white pupa forms.

Reined Stick, 1972

Bill Woodrow, 27/08/2011
—

Reined Stick is a title that I gave to this work at a later date. At the time, I think I probably referred to it as Untitled which highlights the fact that there was an important element of experimentation in the work. I wasn’t making it because I knew exactly what it would be. I was simply trying things out, in this case trying out the layered effects between what is real and what isn’t through the combination of a real object and a photograph of it. I was trying to find ways for these effects to work together in ways that set up visual puzzles for the viewer. These puzzles also brought together different locations, interiors and exteriors. In this instance, the audience looks at the standing figure in the landscape at the same time as it looks at the real stick (and the photograph of the stick) in and through the processes of the studio. I wanted viewers to be disorientated and become confused and question not just what they were looking at, but also where they were looking at things from.