And so it goes: artists from Wales
Richard Deacon, Merlin James and Heather & Ivan Morison

Richard Deacon, Merlin James and Heather & Ivan Morison have been selected to represent Wales at the 52nd Venice Biennale of Art in 2007.

The exhibition aims to draw together some of the common threads that run through the work whilst celebrating each artist’s individual practice.

The title of the exhibition takes its inspiration from Kurt Vonnegut’s classic sci-fi novel Slaughterhouse 5 throughout which the phrase ‘so it goes’ is used to mark a period of transition – from life to death.

It is this notion of transition or of crossing a threshold that connects the artists’ work. The threshold or point of entry might be literally depicted in the work as is often the case with Merlin James’ paintings, where the building, doorway, hut or hole, for example, embodies some sort of notion of penetration and entry and has psychological resonance.

But it also makes reference to marking or determining a boundary: between fact and fiction; past and present; enterable and impenetrable; interior and exterior; self and other; formed and unformed, the real and imagined. Relationships that are, in one way or another, explored by all of the artists in this exhibition.

The works also connect through the artists’ interest in the fundamentals of art production; the nuts and bolts of making and exhibiting work, and how the viewer is implicated in the process.

Merlin James’s paintings fill the first space and mezzanine of the Ex-Birreria. These small and arresting canvases are playful, gestural and unpredictable in form and subject. They are layered, abraded, sometimes punctured, textured with hair or dirt; and their imagery can include landscape elements, interiors, figures, buildings, doorways and sexually explicit scenes.

The complex surfaces of Merlin’s canvases are testament to his endeavour over time; they are rich and rewarding, drawing the eye back and forth across the canvas without necessarily allowing it to settle on a ‘subject’. He shuns the lush seduction of oil paint in favour of the ‘deadness’ of acrylic; but only so that each considered mark has to work to animate the materiality of the surface.

Merlin sees his practice partly as a kind of ‘non-verbal art criticism’ in which his investigations in paint evoke a constellation of different styles and points of art-historical reference. That said, he has no interest in either subverting or adulating tradition, but rather his painting evolves out of a mixture of meticulous analysis and intuitive assimilation of painting practice, remaining fresh and - refreshingly - avoiding both jadedness and nostalgia.

 
The work of Heather & Ivan Morison examines the extraordinary beauty and detail of the natural world. To present their observations they use formal and conceptual devices, engaging with and responding to their surroundings. They survey, meticulously record and collect to rebuild and re-present the familiar, investing their observations and discoveries with vigorous fascination.

In 2005 they acquired a wood in North Wales. They are developing the area of mature conifers into an arboretum, a collection of trees that will be gathered from around the world. As old trees are cleared to make way for new species, they are cut into timber that is used to realise new projects, including much of their exhibition in Venice.

‘Dark Star’, the tape-slide installation in the second gallery of the Ex-Birreria, documents the artists’ search of America for the original nomadic groups of people who travelled through the States in house-trucks made from felled timber. Whilst there, the Morisons gathered accounts from these ‘New Age American Gypsies’ on their time spent building, travelling and living in their rolling homes. The straight documentary images projected on screen are accompanied by a spinning, ominous crystalline form from inside which it seems a Grateful Dead concert is underway.

Outside under the canopy in the beautiful Venetian garden, the Morisons have created Pleasure Island, an organic structure that seemingly emerges from the covered darkness to reach for the light beyond. The sculpture is built from the timber of Douglas Firs, Grand Fir and Western Hemlock that were blown down in their wood in late 2006 and also incorporates panels of coloured Venetian glass. The structure has taken on a parasitic crystalline form, a canker or growth that is both beautiful and yet repellent. It also echoes the geodesic forms designed by Buckminster Fuller in the 1940s and popularised as shelters in the 1970s so that the piece has a complicated relationship with the viewer in its refusal to be pinned down: ugly yet beautiful; organic yet man-made; utopian yet dystopian; dangerous yet a place of safety.

This work has a ‘sister’ sculpture in the woods in North Wales that can be visited for the duration of the biennale and develops the notion that the structure we see here is somehow a spore – itself nomadic - that has been transferred or carried by the artists between Wales and Italy.

Richard Deacon’s diverse practice has consistently challenged and extended notions of what sculpture is, and what it might be. His work communicates the playfulness of an aesthetic freedom that comes from an understanding that art can be made out of anything, deriving its identity and meaning through its context and  audiences.

He is intrigued by the inventive thoughts that stem from the seemingly innocuous passing of time, and these moments of intuitive creative boredom are the springboard for a manifold set of references and ways of seeing that appear to be both accessible and indefinable.

Visiting the spectacular Capannone 1 – the old storage space for the former brewery (or Ex-Birreria) – Richard became intrigued by the nails that uniformly punctuate the walls’ surface. The space became the inspiration for this new body of work. He has utilised the nails, effectively reversing the space to use the wall as floor.

Using ceramic, wood, steel and steel, Richard has created a number of sculptures that are hung from bronze nails, flattening the space so that the work floats free on the walls.

The gallery is partially lit by a dramatic, cinematic shaft of light that is cast on the floor from a single window high in the building’s barrel arched ceiling. This Baroque sense of drama is invested with further meaning by the use of the nails and continues Richard’s material investigations into how we ‘peg’ representation and meaning to objects.

Hannah Firth, Curator, Wales at the Venice Biennale of Art 2007