Archive / Essays & Writing
Deities At The Bottom Of The Garden
Introduction by Dominic Mason
Originally published in the exhibition catalogue,
20-21 Visual Arts Centre, Scunthorpe, 2012.
Introduction
Sheffield has a proud history of craftsmanship and making, from the cutlery industry that flourished from the 14th century onwards, when self-employed craftsmen or little mesters rented spaces to live, work and manufacture, through to today's specialist steel makers and accomplished silversmiths.
Richard Bartle works from his studio and workshop in the former home of Granton Ragg Ltd, a knife and medical instrument maker with over 400 years of history in the city. Like most remaining manufacturers in the area, the firm has now moved to premises away from the city centre, leaving former industrial areas to be repopulated by creative industries, hi-tech offices and new-build apartments. Now the building is home to Bloc, a sprawling studio complex that Richard has built up over the past 16 years. In the heart of Sheffield's creative community, the building houses the workplaces of over 60 artists and is home to Bloc Projects, a contemporary gallery space with a national reputation for exhibiting work by emerging artists.
Richard's work stems from an engagement with culture, world politics, philosophy, society and the environment. Past works include paintings portraying kaleidoscopic repeated images: houses, industrial machinery, astronauts and tower blocks, hovering within semi-abstract landscapes, between visible layers of the atmosphere and the strata and sediment of the earth. He has produced stainless-steel doves that sit atop buildings in Sheffield centre, referencing Pablo Picasso's visit to the Second World Peace Congress in 1950, signposted a ramshackle fantasy sea-life centre in a city subway, and created installations populated by images of conflict, turmoil, religious iconography, and political power. Despite the often-fractured nature of his subjects and imagery, at the heart of Richard's work is a desire for harmony; a utopian belief, perhaps, that despite the conflict and discord in the world, there are solutions available to those who truly seek them.
For artists to be dedicated to their materials and to study the world around them diligently is far from uncommon, although more than often dedication in art tends to focus on the singular or the minutiae — a landscape from a favoured fixed viewpoint, the mastery of drawing a single human form, or the study of a contained series of objects within a still-life. Bartle's work in comparison strives to encompass the global, to quantify a whole, in a quest to get the measure of the world around him.
Richard first worked with 20-21 Visual Arts Centre in 2008 when he exhibited Pow-Wow, a large-scale work documenting every world leader serving during the duration of George Bush's US presidency. Like his current project it was an epic and ambitious undertaking, with 196 individual canvas panels portraying each of the world's leaders. Evolving as each leader was replaced and each panel reworked, Pow-Wow demonstrated a coming together of material process and depiction of social-political history through time, something that has continued in his current body of work.
In the summers of 2008 and 2012, supported by a research and development grant from Arts Council England, Richard undertook two residencies in Istanbul, the first facilitated by Platform Garanti, and the second coinciding with his invitation to produce work for the Mardin Biennial. Living and working amongst the diverse amalgamation of religions and cultures in the city, the experience marked a move towards making a work from a truly global perspective. For Mardin Richard produced a series of beautifully crafted scale modelled chairs, cataloguing the history and traditions of civilizations from the Mardin region, from the Romans to the modern republic. As in his current work, painstaking research into the historical, social and political context of his sculptures was mirrored in his dedication to materials, process and making.
Deities At The Bottom Of The Garden is Richard's largest and most ambitious work to date, the culmination of over three years of painstaking research, development, manufacture and devotion. It has been a pleasure seeing the work develop over this time and seeing an artist showing real pride and dedication to his work. On regularly passing by Richard's studio, I'd often hear the sound of machinery coming from his workshop and imagine him turning a miniature candlestick, polishing a scale model artefact or carving the decoration on a Lilliputian pew or chair-back.
For an artist to show such a dedication to the skilled act of making is all the more pertinent in our current age of mass production, as is the work of an artist that seeks to unravel the driving forces behind current global tensions, in the face of overseas conflict, the fall-out from the Arab Spring and ongoing Western involvement overseas. As visitors to the exhibition are seduced by these beautiful interiors, I hope that they take time to ponder the meaning of devotion, whether it is to religion, art, vocation, or to the people and objects that they themselves, or others around them hold dear. I'd also like to think that, like Richard, they might have a little more faith that despite our differences, we share sufficient common ground to strive towards mutual understanding of those whose beliefs differ from our own.
Dominic Mason
20-21 Visual Arts Centre