STUDIO
VISIT
The Matrix Man: Jon Isherwood in conversation with ERIC GELBER
"His sculptures
are matrices, in which a mysterious emptiness is embedded"
Jon Isherwood Prodigious
Builders [materials and dimensions to follow]
Private Collection, Maryland. All images courtesy the artist
While returning home to Manhattan
via Amtrak after my interview with Jon Isherwood I realized that the
experience of living with his sculptures for a few hours had transformed
my way of seeing natural rock formations. The rocks that occasionally
appeared to the sides of the train path fuzzed with energy and the shadowy
crevices in the rock face pulsated. His sculptures modify our seeing
habits.
In the eighties Isherwood
struggled to escape the influence of his long time mentor Anthony Caro,
but he had to stop making steel and cast concrete sculptures in order
to do this.. The tall stone monoliths he made throughout the nineties
and beyond were a radical departure from his earlier work and embodied
his unique vision. Using wire saws, drills, and carving tools, Isherwood
draws a few simple marks or shapes (circles within circles and straight
lines) in the partially finished pieces of stone. The carved or cut
shapes are unevenly distributed and do not detract from the natural
beauty of the stone. These monoliths, all-seeing presences in the landscape,
are imposing because of their combination of jagged and straight edges
and their height. Because these upright stones connote graves or memorials,
they inspire somber moods, but since they have no utilitarian purpose,
we can revel in their abstract symbolism. The slots or slits cut into
these monoliths create hidden spaces within the external sheath of stone.
They are suggestive and act as lures, inviting us to investigate them
with our hands and eyes, to go beyond surfaces. Isherwood wants us to
physically interact with the art object and these inner spaces inspire
us to do more than simply look at them. They convince us that there
is something to discover through an investigation of the various parts.
Isherwood's newest sculptures,
which are smaller in scale than the monoliths and made with the help
of computer numerically controlled technology (CNC), are bulging, bulbous
forms reminiscent of the Venus of Willendorf. They are Falstaffian in
comparison to the tall monoliths and represent another radical departure.
The forms appear to be compressed, distorted or squeezed by gravity.
Even though stone is the medium, Isherwood creates the illusion of expansiveness.
He does not emulate flesh, but the bulbous shapes are vulnerable and
comforting. One wants to encompass them with outstretched arms or run
hands across them. Instead of making minimal marks on the surface of
the stone in order to create an abstract persona, the CNC pieces have
rows of lines covering almost their entire surface. The lines the machine
carves into the stone follow the stone's form and accentuate the roundness
and bulginess. These bloated forms undermine our expectations of the
medium. Isherwood carefully chooses the rocks he uses and makes sure
the veins in the stone appear in places that will increase the drama
and beauty of the whole. Most of these mysterious receptacles have openings
on top and hollowed-out centers. Again viewers are tempted to look into
the darkness, to investigate unknown spaces, rather than simply admire
something that takes up space.
Isherwood's sculptures do
not resemble bones, microscopic life-forms or plantlife, and they are
not retro abstractions of the human form. Isherwood avoids any vitalist
mannerisms, unlike many of Henry Moore's followers, by contemplating
the psychological impact indoor and outdoor spaces have on us. He is
interested in the locus of human emotions within the landscape and the
inner processes of the human body, rather than external form. His sculptures
are matrices, in which a mysterious emptiness is embedded, and we are
invited to invest our psyches in the spaces they contain.
Jon Isherwood at
First Appearances 2003
champion marble, 16 x 42 x 41 inches
Why did you become a sculptor
instead of a painter or architect?
In the early days, any extension of the hand, a pencil, a paintbrush
or some other device, seemed inappropriate. It was grasping and grabbing
and holding that seemed to be the important things for me. I think that
was the first clue. I think it was the influence of people too. I remember
seeing the Henry Moore show in Bradford, England at Cartwright Hall
in '78, and I remember walking through that show. I was seventeen or
eighteen at the time. I had no sense of sculpture whatsoever. There
was this incredible physical presence that was full of body, full of
a dynamic that I hadn't seen or understood before. There was an abstractness
to it I didn't understand. I think it was that, seeing those early Henry
Moores, that made me see the potential of human imagination through
interaction with the hand.
Can you describe your
earliest experiences of what Herbert Read has called "sculptural
sensations"?
I think that those first sculptural sensations had to do with landscape.
In the North of England, because of the hills and dales, you feel as
though you live in the landscape rather than on it! I think places that
one would go to as a kid, like caves, quarries, derelict factory buildings,
were incredibly intriguing, were primal three-dimensional sensations.
My father died when I was very young. It was an incredibly emotional
thing, and it was also a very physical thing; sort of like an emptiness.
Something had been taken from me. And that sort of void or emptiness
was a primary physical sensation. Some of my early sculptures at college
were bodies that didn't have any insides. The inside was empty, gouged
out. I think there was some sort of correspondence between all of these
feelings.
Talk about the genesis
of your work, your journey from steel and concrete to stone? Your enigmatic
stone monoliths are not expressionistic like your earlier steel and
concrete pieces, and currently the computer plays an essential, although
intermediary role in the shaping of the final form.
I think that during the transition from student work to what I would
call more personal or mature work I was influenced greatly by Tony Caro.
. . his formal dialogue about sculpture making. I attempted to establish
my own language through working with steel, but found it incredibly
difficult to really transform the material. Steel always, no matter
how much I connected it, welded it, bashed it around, forged it, or
manipulated and changed it, held its original identity and the historic
legacy of steel sculpture. I really felt that it wasn't plastic enough
for me. I introduced the concrete into the process as an attempt to
make the image more fluid, perhaps more personal, gestural, emotionally
driven. I was getting closer to what I wanted, which was to move away
from a tradition I was stifled by.
This was an incredible breakthrough
for me, but I became less and less satisfied with the gesture. I realized
that it was little more than a frozen moment marking the release of
energy. I decided that I needed to make sculptures that were more defined
and resolute, that the work also had to become intrinsically three-dimensional.
So I started to think about considering the whole, to think completely
in the round, which meant becoming more simplistic, to make sure each
façade or each side interrelated.
I think I was also in search
of the self, the body. I was in search of an emotional presence. I then
began to think about what goes on internally in a form and the way emotion
wells up inside of us. I now had to establish a place of entry into
the sculpture. Simultaneously, I was invited by Phil Berman to work
in stone. I had no intention to go to stone. He had a quarry and said
why not come and try the material out.
This was a really significant
moment for me. At first it was quite stifling. It wasn't fluid at all.
One had to deal with a lump, but it was undeniably three-dimensional,
a true mass. And I was given the opportunity to look for a way into
the rock. I thought about what Michelangelo said about removing everything
that wasn't David to get to David. I was thinking about that yet noticed
that the outside of the rock was wonderful as it was. Why remove the
outside, why not remove the inside? I started to cut and make these
defined internal shapes. . . .as if to accentuate the external mantle
or skin.
They reference ancient monoliths
as you say. Coming from England I grew up around all of these freestanding
stones. It's ingrained in my subconscious, the sense of presence from
those places. This is what sculpture quintessentially is, a pinnacle
or reference point in the landscape, a connection between land and sky.
It is the plane we exist on. Therefore it is our reference point. In
terms of thinking with the computer, it is my ambition to have more
control over the mantle and make sculpture that resonates internally
and externally simultaneously.
After coming to the United
States in 1983 to study sculpture at Syracuse University you assisted
the sculptor Anthony Caro for approximately 11 years. How did your initial
meeting with him come about?
During my undergraduate studies I was working with a fellow sculptor,
actually he was my teacher, John Gibbons, and he asked me if I wanted
some weekend work renovating an old building. There we were banging
walls out, and this guy comes in, and I said I recognize that guy, its
Tony Caro, Turns out it was his place. .
He asked me if I wanted some
work on the weekends. So I would go up on the weekends and weld pieces
together for him. I would do all the fabrication work. Then for two
years after finishing at Canterbury College of Art I worked full-time
for him in London.
He built a studio in upstate
New York and asked me if I wanted to run the place for him, which I
did. I started to learn about all of the things you didn't learn about
in college. How does a studio work? How do you work in the studio? How
do you maintain a professional life? How do you go about keeping yourself
engaged with your own work? How does work develop? He introduced me
to a lot of people, some incredible thinkers. That exposure was invaluable.
It allowed me to learn about art through the experience of it.
You work with rather traditional
materials but at the same time you have brought the computer into your
working process. You still make art objects. You have not attempted
to dematerialize the art object in the way a process or conceptual artist
would, nor have you created anonymous objects, like the Minimalists,
in an attempt to erase the individual maker. Although, based on statements
you made during an interview for Sculpture Magazine in 2001, it appears
that you are just as concerned about the environment or setting the
sculpture appears in as the Minimalists were. Can you talk about how
you see yourself within the context of the contemporary art scene?
That's something that is really challenging for me…I think
that the new work I have been doing with the computer is an attempt
to think differently about volume, how we think about the skin or mantle,
how we think about mass. I want them to be a place where the psychological
and the physical connect visually, like the way nerve endings connect
to the skin. When you experience great art or architecture you are left
with what I call an after image that is neither body nor building. My
sculpture is an attempt to explain and reveal the shape of the sensations
we have. I want the sculpture to feel as though it is at its most defining
moment, as with heightened experiences, to be a moment of full expression
and full emotion. I do feel that I am within a lineage, within a tradition
of making. I think that the modern tradition is still really new and
underdeveloped. There are very few real definitive moments even in modern
sculpture, the sculpture of the last one hundred years. I think the
dialogue between figuration and abstraction in sculpture is still unresolved.
My ambition is to investigate new ways of bringing the body and its
multitude of sensations played out in a single lump as the body is,
into the work.
Continued
