Linder and
Kenny in conversation
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| Diagrams of Love : Marriage of eyes at the British Art Show 8, Leeds Art Gallery |
Linder Sterling is
an artist whose work I’ve come across before. I saw some of her earlier and her
recent pieces at the Hepworth Gallery in 2013. She is primarily recognised as a
collage artist. To be honest I found her work really quite unengaging when I
saw it at the Hepworth. It was a response to Barbara Hepworth herself, but
seemed to lack any finesse. Her flat, quite minimal collages were very removed
from Barbara Hepworth’s conceptually complex, solid structures. However,
Linder’s piece in the British Art Show 8 – Diagrams of Love : Marriage of
Eyes - is a gorgeous, sumptuous spiral
carpet which seemed to me to be quite at odds with her earlier pieces. So I
went to her talk with an open mind, to try to find out more.
Linder wasn’t at
all like I’d expected. As she remarked during the talk, she was brought up near
Wigan, and I expected her to be a lot more brash than she was, particularly she’d
been active in the punk scene in Manchester (Ellis-Petersen, 2015). In fact she
was quite reserved and well-spoken.
Linder’s 1970
collages dealt with the portrayal of women, in particular the tension between
fashion photography of that time – which often portrayed women outdoors – vs
the adverts which portrayed the woman’s place as in the home. Her work, by her
own admission, is minimal; she considers “images are fragile… constructed. Here
I realised why I don’t engage very well with her work; I like a lot of visual
complexity to give me some kind of challenge in what I see. Linder was simply
not aiming for that goal. To quote her, she wanted to “send the images where
they shouldn’t go by the least addition possible”.
She explained that
she “fell in love” (her words) with Hepworth when she was invited to explore
Hepworth’s sculptures in her garden in St Ives one night in the rain; they had
to be explored by touch. She began intensive research into Hepworth’s work,
trying to respond to it with a modern narrative. For example, could Hepworth’s
“Family of Man” (1970) now have a non-typical family? This led to her collaborating
with Kenneth Tindall (whom she referred to as “Kenny”), a choreographer who works
with the Northern Ballet (Northern Ballet, n.d), on a 2013 performance piece
called “The Ultimate Form”. Quite how this collaboration came about wasn’t made
clear, but Linder said she had been looking to give form to her research into
Hepworth and it came about in this new way (so I am not the only creative
practitioner who does a lot of research and then wonders what to do with it
all!).
For the British
Art Show 8, Linder had worked with the Edinburgh carpet studio, Dovecot, to
create the carpet, which was inspired by a visit to a London flat with 1970s
carpets (Ellis-Petersen, 2015). She confirmed this had been a challenge for
both herself and Dovecot – it “raised the bar” for both parties, as she put it.
Kenny then joined
the conversation and the pair started to talk about their upcoming
collaboration, another ballet called “Children of the Mantic Stain” (Linder’s
title). This is a piece concerning a group of friends, based on Hepworth and
her associates. Kenny was effusive about Linder; he praised her detailed
research but stressed that it had taken him a long time to digest. However, she
“helped him find a way in” (his words) and the creative process “started to
happen” – he admitted this was a very different way of working for him and he
wasn’t sure what this process was (so, again, I’m not the only artist who
wonders if and when something will ever happen in the creative process!). The
pair worked with a composer called Max Sterling (unclear if he is any relation
to Linder), and the three of them developed the ballet with the dancers. By
having three different creative viewpoints, Kenny made it very clear that the
ballet broke new ground. Everyone involved in the project had to push
boundaries and find creative solutions to new problems – not least that of
dancing with the spiral carpet, which, according to Kenny, never behaves in the
same way twice. (a good example of practice-based research!). Also, the costumes
the dancers will wear are actually pieces from the collections of the fashion
designer Christopher Shannon, rather than the usual minimalist dancewear, which
will potentially alter their movement once they rehearse in them. The
performance is on November 20th in the Tiled Hall at Leeds Art
Gallery.
This was a really
good example of a creative collaboration which had led to an rather unusual
outcome. It is one for me to continue to refer back to for inspiration.
Except where
stated, sourced from my visit to:
Linder Sterling
and Kenneth Tindall, Tuesday Talk as
part of British Art Show 8, 27th October 2015, Leeds Art Gallery,
Leeds
Ellis-Petersen, H., Linder Sterling : ‘I have a library of every perversion on the planet’ at http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/oct/07/linder-sterling-art-punk-feminism-performance-art?CMP=share_btn_tw (accessed 8th October 2015)
Northern Ballet (n.d.),
Kenneth Tindall : Premier Dancer at http://northernballet.com/biography/kenneth-tindall
(accessed 2nd November 2015)
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