Interview with Mary Griffiths

23/03/19

Interview with Mary Griffiths

Protest and Remembrance

Miriam de Búrca | Joy Gerrard | Mary Griffiths | Barbara Walker
Alan Cristea Gallery, London

28 February – 30 March 2019

Mary Griffiths (b1965, the Wirral) has long been making drawings of (frequently derelict) industrial sites. A year and a half ago, she was introduced to Astley Green Colliery, a former coalmine in Lancashire, which was closed in 1970 and knocked down but for its winding house and headgear – rare examples of 1908 working-class engineering. Spending time at the site, walking around the surrounding geography, reclaimed by nature with trees, grass and mosses, and talking to the volunteers (the colliery is now a museum), Griffiths filled myriad A6 sketchpads with figurative drawings, focusing on aspects that intrigued her, from details of the machinery to a visiting colony of pigeons. From these drawings, she then extrapolated her larger abstract works, made on plywood, with layers of acrylic gesso, and even more layers of graphite, pushed into the board and burnished, before being cut into with an etching needle. Using thousands of straight lines, placed at minutely different angles, she creates an oscillating effect reminiscent of the surface geography of the region. One work, Wild Honey, for example, represents the seams of the coalmine, the waterways and the main roads. Griffiths sees her work as “an identification of the remarkable work that was done in industrial areas” across the country, and it is important to her to capture something of the “gravity and splendour” of the working-class engineering.

Watch the interview here

Interview with Conrad Shawcross about The Optic Cloak

20/09/16
Interview: Conrad Shawcross
The Optic Cloak, Greenwich Peninsula

His largest scale project to date, The Optic Cloak is an architectural intervention, commissioned by Knight Dragon, in which the sculptor Conrad Shawcross has created a 49-metre-tall aluminium cladding for a flue stack, 20 metres wide and 3 metres deep, standing on the roadside on the Greenwich Peninsula. Making use of the Moiré Effect, Shawcross has tessellated together triangular panels, creating a disrupted surface, which allows light through, causing a flux, or undulation, as if the ‘cloak’ were moving. During the evening, the tower will be lit from within, continually redefining the shape of the structure and its surroundings. Inspirations come from such spheres as maritime camouflage, cubism and op art. The Optic Cloak has been designed in collaboration with the architectural practice CF Møller Architects.

Watch this interview here

Interview with Conrad Shawcross re Paradigm at the Francis Crick Institute

24/02/16

Interview with Conrad Shawcross 

Paradigm 

Francis Crick Institute

In the final throes of putting together a new sculpture, Paradigm, to stand outside the Francis Crick Institute, near King’s Cross, London, Conrad Shawcross (b1977) is fulfilling the role of director – as well as creator – as his teams in both his studio and the fabricator Benson and Sedgwick endeavour to get everything ready in time.

Studio International was lucky enough to accompany Shawcross on a visit to Benson and Sedgwick, where he saw the sculpture, for the first time, in a nearly complete state. “It’s like being seven years old again and it being Christmas Eve!” he said, looking around excitedly with his camera phone out and a big grin on his face. The work, made of weathered steel, stands 14 metres high and is 5 metres at its widest point, but balances (albeit with some serious underground bolting, deeper than the height of the sculpture itself) on a base of less than one metre wide. The precariousness and audacity of the tetrahedral forms is breathtaking, even seeing the piece as it lay on its side.

We were also able to watch and film as the sculpture was installed at its new location, outside the Francis Crick Institute at King’s Cross.

Watch the interview here