Brick Project at RIBA

Thanks to all who came to hear me talk about bricks at RIBA London on Tuesday 8 March, please find below some images from the evening. Special thanks to Smeed Dean Brick Works for supplying the bricks.
Photos: Joanna Brinton.

Brick Project at RIBA

I'm excited to announce that I will be presenting Brick Project on Tuesday 8 March at RIBA as part of their public programme for the exhibition Creation for Catastrophe further will be posted soon.

 Laura Wilson, Brick Project (2010 - ). Peru.

Bishops Park, brick plinths

Brick plinths in Bishops Park in Fulham. The gardens contain stone figures depicting 'Adoration', 'Protection', 'Grief' and 'Leda', presented by the sculptor J. Wedgwood.

Metro: Block-obsessed collector scours Britain for another brick for his wall

 From today's Metro on p27:

Metro, Wednesday 22 May 2013, p27

Some people collect stamps, others coins and trainspotters have to accumulate engine numbers – but have you ever heard of anyone collecting bricks?

For over two decades, Neil Brittlebank has travelled the length and breadth of Britain amassing a batch of rare bricks.

He even convinced his daughter, Gail, to carry a brick she found while on holiday in France around in her backpack so he could add it to his collection.

And each of his 1,000 blocks has a story to tell, says the 78-year-old.

‘I just think it’s a shame not to preserve them, they are part of our history,’ said Mr Brittlebank, whose oldest brick dates back to 1892.

He scours demolition sites, disused buildings and hedgerows to seek out bricks for his pile.

‘I have one which is rather rare, in that it should say Ackrington Iron on it. But what it actually says is Ackrington Nori,’ said the father-of-two.

The retired mine safety worker’s love of bricks started in 1990, when he heard his old pit, Lofthouse Colliery, in west Yorkshire, was going to be demolished to make way for a country park.

‘I could see all these old bricks lying around and asked a man working on the redevelopment what was going to happen to them,’ said Mr Brittlebank.

‘He said they were going to be crushed and I thought it was a shame, so I asked if I could have some – the collection started from there,’ he said.

Rather than clog up his home in East Ardsley, near Leeds, with his collection, Mr Brittlebank has used the bricks to build a garden path and driveway.

At least it means long-suffering wife, Maureen, doesn’t have to clean his haul.

But if she objects to her husband’s obsession, it seems, some of their neighbours encourage it.

‘People leave them for me, sometimes,’ said Mr Brittlebank. ‘I open the door and find bricks on the doorstep.’

Brick from Demolition of Spandau Prison

The Antiques Road Show which aired on Sunday 14 April featured a brick from Spandau Prison, Berlin. The prison was demolished in 1987 after the death of its last prisoner, Rudolf Hess. Follow this link to watch the clip on the BBC website: ---> http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p017mfyr

Brick Project at Turner Contemporary

Yesterday I presented Brick Project at Turner Contemporary in Margate. For more information and documentation please click here.

Smeed Dean Brick Works

On Friday I went to visit the Smeed Dean Brick Works in Sittingbourne, Kent. It is the last remaining brick works in Kent and the only factory in the UK which produces the original Yellow London Stock Brick, which has a distinctive pale yellow colour with various irregularities created during the firing process.

The factory was established in 1845 by Smeed and Dean and in the 1880's was the largest in Britain, producing 8 million London stocks annually.  At the time, it was a huge employer in the area – building cottages and a church for the workers near to the factory. Today the factory is run by the large company Wienerberger and it is operated by a team of 35 employees who still live locally, the factory produces 16-17 million bricks every year.

Each brick takes approximately 6 days to produce. Please find below some images from my visit.

Carl Andre, Equivalent VIII, 1966

Carl Andre, Equivalent VIII, 1966

I went to the Tate Modern today to visit Carl Andre's brick sculpture Equivalent VIII, made in 1966 and purchased by Tate in 1972, after which it sparked a lot of controversy from the public.

"Carl Andre's Equivalent VIII has 120 bricks stacked 2 deep x 6 wide x 10 long. The other equivalents in the series also have 120 bricks, identically aligned, may be combined into 90 different cuboids, (induding the most compact) a stack 8 x 5 x 3 and (the least) the three single file rows along each of the dimensional axes. Each of these 90 cuboids can in turn be set up on the floor in three different ways. Thus there are 270 possible combinations. And looking down on Equivalent VIII we may perhaps imagine looking up at Equivalent CCLXVII – a single file vertical column of 120 bricks laid end-on-end, which would, if it stood almost 30 metres above the ground"

– Tom Lubbock

Here is a clip from the documentary, Upholding the Bricks, produced in 1991 by Channel 4 and narrated by the British television presenter - Raymond Baxter - who incidentally is also Carl Andre’s Uncle. 

Bricks from Norwich

Reclaimed bricks from Norwich for Brick Project at Outpost on Thursday 13 December.

Cow Tower, Norwich

Entirely made of bricks, The Norwich Cow Tower is an historic military tower that stands in Hospital Meadow beside a sharp bend of the River Wensum, Norwich. It is one of the earliest purpose-built artillery blockhouses in England and gets its name from the water meadow, once known as Cowholme, in which it stands.

It is about 15.2m high, with an internal diameter of 7.3m.

It was erected at the end of the 14th century as part of Norwich’s defences, but it was not linked with the city walls. The city records include a treasurer’s account for purchase of bricks and recorded as complete by 1398-99, when the mason Robert Snape was paid for making 12 shotholes. He was subsequently made a freeman of Norwich. 

The bricks vary in size, colour, texture. Apparently place bricks, not evenly mixed or always flat, but strong. 2 inch thick only, but length varying from 9 to 12 inch (10 inch perhaps most common) and width from 4 to 7 inch. Colours: dull straw, dark red, red, pink, orange, bright yellow, green, grey. Courses not true horizontal, but rising especially around the stair turret. Largely stretcher bond. Some header courses, especially in turret.

Brick Project at Outpost Members Show 2012

I am presenting a lecture on Brick Project as part of the Outpost Members Show 2012 selected by Ruth Ewan which opens this Saturday 1 December. The lecture will take place at Outpost on Thursday 13 December, 6-9pm, Tom Smith will also be performing work the same evening.

More information on this ongoing work please visit the Brick Project blog http://www.brick-project.blogspot.com/
OUTPOST MEMBERS SHOW 2012

Selected by Ruth Ewan

Johann Arens / Maeve Brennan / Tom Crawford / Will Cruickshank / Mark Essen / Candice Jacobs / Leo Koivistoinen / Simon Liddiment / Scott Massey / Terence McCormack / Stella Ouzounidou / Andy Parker / Tom Smith / Laura Wilson

Opening View: 1 December
Exhibition runs until 21 December

OUTPOST
10b Wensum Street, Norwich, NR3 1HR
questions@norwichoutpost.org / www.norwichoutpost.org
+44 (0) 1603 612 428 / charity number 1109254

Brick Project at Whitstable Biennale 2012

Photo: Cush

On Sunday 2 September, I will present a talk about Brick Project as part of the Whitstable Biennale at 3pm in Whitstable Library. (Click here for more information on this event: http://bit.ly/TDkuIQ, and see below for further information on the Biennale)

THE 6TH WHITSTABLE BIENNALE 2012 

September 1 - 16

Full programme details are available at www.whitstablebiennale.com and a NEW Whitstable Biennale 2012 smartphone App will be available nearer the opening date.

Three main programmes thread their way through the Biennale weekends.

Programme 1: curated by The Island (Victoria Brooks and Andrew Bonacina)

Programme 2: curated by Jeremy Millar

Programme 3: curated by Emma Leach

Artists 2012

Tanya Axford • Oliver Beer • Emma Bennett • Iain Boal • Tim Bromage • Chloe Cooper • Phil Coy • Shezad Dawood • Maya Deren • Benedict Drew • Angus H Braithwaite • Martin John Callanan • Tom Gidley • Emma Hart • Sam Hasler • Internet (Siân Robinson Davies & Diego Chamy) • Derek Jarman • Jesse Jones • Ben Judd • Joachim Koester • Tessa Lynch • Gareth Moore • Jenny Moore • Daniel Oliver • Performance Klub Fiskulturnik • Possibility Archive • Kieren Reed • John Smith • Tim Spooner • Patrick Staff • Cara Tolmie • Touch • Uddin & Elsey • Aaron Williamson. Most are new commissions.

Talks 2012

Artist and writer Jeremy Millar • artist Laura Wilson • Mike Harding, BJ Nilsen & Jon Wozencroft from Touch music • choreographer Siobhan Davies & artist Marcus Coates • artist Shezad Dawood • Professor Paul Allain • Producer John Wyver.

WCMT Award Ceremony

Baroness Tanni Grey-Thompson

Lady Soames and I at the reception

On Wednesday 30 May I attended the WCMT Award Ceremony where I received my medallion and officially became a Churchill Fellow. It was a lovely event at the Church House Assembly Hall in Westminster and a great chance to meet with the other fellows. For the Ceremony I wore a dress by Olivia Rubin which features a brick print.
To download my report please follow this link http://www.wcmt.org.uk/press/greater-london.html

Ally Pally

On Sunday I went up to Alexandra Palace for the first time, a great brick building completed in 1873 and constructed by the Lucas Bothers who also built the Royal Albert Hall. For more information click here .

Mini brick

Thankyou to Georgina Corrie for the mini brick-what a lovely surprise! (the blue high lighter is for scale)
Made by the London brick company!

Brick Project in Art Vehicle 61

Artvehicle 61/Review

21st January 2012 — 21st January 2012

Photo by Emma Peascod

Curated by Ali MacGilp, this evening of performance featured six London-based contemporary artists whose individual pieces were created in response to the unique culture of Amsterdam and its seedy central distri

ct. A bizarre conglomeration of prostitutes in windows, beautiful wonky old buildings, notorious coffee-shops and stoner tourist trade, the red-light district of Amsterdam provides the perfect background to this exploration of a place, its identity and the elements of its world that we may ordinarily overlook.

What was really interesting was the sheer scope of the exhibition; for each artist's response to the environment was so completely different, as was the way in which they chose to present their work and engage with the audience. On the one hand we had the domestic intimacy of Rhiannon Armstrong'sEverything You Ever Wanted To Say But Didn't, and on the other the formal lecture set-up of Laura Wilson's Brick Project. We had Mark Wayman playing a kind of pseudo tour-guide in Re-Occupy and Adrian Lee confusing / amusing both gallery visitors and passers-by with his comic, provocative one-man protest. Adam James and Andrew Graham took the actual audience as their subject matter and re-played it to them in their piece Vlo, whilst Tobias Collier presented a continuation of his self-branding project in a way that was both intimately engaging and epic in its projected form.

There was no official 'start' to the proceedings (which seemed to baffle some of the audience) and it was fascinating to observe how the crowd appeared to engage or disengage with the performances, depending on how they were presented.

Taking to extremes the maxim that 'no publicity is bad publicity', Lee loitered around the gallery entrance, taunting passers-by with his "wanton self-promotion" posters, "Ban This Filth" placard and blacked-out leaflets of banned books. Dressed in his finest 'disgusted from Tunbridge Wells' attire, his calls to the local crowd to "walk away from this muck" led to much confusion, mirth, a brief encounter with the local constabulary and the odd pervy drunk who couldn't wait to come inside to find out just what kind of filth was on offer (no doubt disappointed to only find a bunch of arty types hanging about watching stuff). The irony of this publicity protest may have been lost on some of the Saturday night crowd on the Warmoesstraat, but it certainly was not on most of the gallery goers inside.

Mark Wayman's Re-Occupy similarly sought to engage passers-by as well as those who were deliberate participants from W139. Taking place in the middle of the former Occupy Amsterdam site (just a stones-throw from the gallery) he led the crowd on a virtual tour of the now largely defunct camp; re-imagining (and thereby temporarily re-occupying) the square. Carefully putting back all the tents into the exact same spaces they had actually occupied by engaging our imaginations with his highly detailed descriptions, his ability to make us see what was no longer there exposed the way in which we take our public spaces or experiences for granted, and how we often fail to notice the obvious until it is gone.

To those in the know (and the locals of Amsterdam) this was a highly accurate oral replication of the actual Occupy site, but to the visitor there was the added dimension that this may indeed have been merely Wayman's vision of what the protest camp may have looked like, and that his 'performance' as a virtual tour-guide was no more than a carefully orchestrated fictional charade.

Back in the gallery, both Armstrong and James/Grahams' performances sought to engage the audience in a dichotomy of personal encounter and observational distance; allowing people to dip into and out of the performances (in the case of James/Graham without necessarily being aware of the role which they were playing), whilst relying on their participation to create the very works themselves. This dual experience was beautifully achieved in Armstrong's Everything You Ever Wanted To Say But Didn't Part 1 and The Archive Of Things Left Unsaid.

Set up in a corner of the gallery, Armstrong had recreated a cosy and very British sitting room space, complete with handmade crocheted blankets, doilies and homemade biscuits. In this cordoned off area, she held as series of brief one-on-one encounters with a number of different voluntary participants. These encounters were based around a collection of deeply personal stories taken from her long-established archive of things left unsaid; an archive which audience members were encouraged to add to in the other half of the piece. The playing out of these intimate conversations, however, remained in the public space; enabling other members of the audience to observe the exchanges but not necessarily hear what was going on, and providing an interesting experience of public versus private space and personal versus public information. It was fascinating to watch both the behaviours and reactions of the people participating in the conversations and those contributing their stories to the ever-growing archive. I was left wondering though whether the stories from Amsterdam would then change the feel and presentation of the piece in its future incarnation. Maybe next time there will be a typically Dutch sitting room set up in the corner of a Japanese gallery taking these (universal) stories from a specific place to another space?

Wilson's fascinating lecture on the history and geography of bricks and brickmaking held particular resonance for the setting as much of old Amsterdam (and its curiously wonky buildings) is constructed from this ancient material. Her formalised talk gave the audience yet another kind of performance/engagement experience, as well as providing a new layer to this story of the city; a story which refuses to pander to the global stereotype of Amsterdam as merely the scuzzy mecca of European sex and drug tourism. Instead, Wilson's piece helped to reiterate the strong history of craft and engineering skill behind this picturesque and beautiful place, whilst celebrating the universality of the common brick.

Collier's Anthropic Principles added perhaps the final dimension to this experience of a place by linking the local penchant for tattoo parlours with the greater cosmos. Inviting the audience to closely observe as he tattooed himself under lamplight whilst the giant projection screen followed this process in negative format; making his arm and former brandings look like the Milky Way. There was also an element of the experience which mirrored the kind of exchange taking place in the windows of the local brothels, for we, the audience, watch in complicity as his body is branded and put on display for public consumption.

The evening ended with the movement-based conclusion of James/Graham's observational foray into the behaviours of certain characters from the local area (collected in the week prior to the show) and members of the CLIMB LIKE A CUCUMBER audience (collected on the night by way of a live-feed and a kind of brainstorm drawing undertaken by the pair throughout the evening). The duo then acted out and mimicked elements of movement, and snippets of conversations, based on the behaviours they had observed both from the gallery and from the streets; again exposing the contrast between the private and the public, the internalised and externalised behaviours of the local people, and the different roles played by the audience as both participant and observer.

From the personal to the universal, from contemporary culture and politics to the historical grounding of a city, this ambitious evening of performance touched on many of the different aspects that contribute to the notion and identity of a place. Leading the audience through a mix of observational/participatory experiences, and revealing aspects of the city no doubt frequently overlooked by the outsiders' eye, the success of CLIMB LIKE A CUCUMBER, FALL LIKE AN AUBERGINE lay in its ability to expose and question, in a diverse variety of forms, our sense of the city and its myriad experiences.

For more information on the individual artists involved, please follow the links below:

Tobias Collier www.tobiascollier.com

Adam James and Andrew Graham www.mradamjames.com or on Twitter @adamjamesstudio

Adrian Lee www.inquino.com / www.bunnycigarettes.com /www.perfectmother.com

Laura Wilson www.laurawilson.me or on Twitter @Laura_wil

Caroline Darke

Brick Lane Bricks

Olympic Games take the bricks out of Brick Lane

7th Feb, East London Lines

Photo: Adelle Kalakouti

Residents are split over a plan to resurface Brick Lane with tarmac in preparation for this year’s Olympics.

The controversial face-lift will include new lighting and the complete resurfacing of its famous underfoot bricks.

Tower Hamlets cabinet member for the environment Shahed Ali said: “The new asphalt surface on Brick Lane will be smarter, easier and cheaper to maintain and will help distinguish space for pedestrians from traffic.”

But Brick Lane businesses have greeted the council’s decision with mixed feelings.

Anna Sims of Heba vintage clothes shop told EastLondonLines: “It is a good thing, it needs modernising and repairing. Brick Lane has its history but it is renowned for being grubby. It will still pull the vintage crowds, a road is just a road at the end of the day.”

But Mohammed Maksudul Kabir, owner of the Banoful Cake House, disagrees: “Before, when the road was made of brick it was nicer. Now it is going to lose its character and tradition, it’s going to be like a normal road. There is no need to waste money on that.”

Local supermarket owner Junel Khalikue said: “The bricks go perfectly with the name Brick Lane. We like it.”

Restaurant and shop owners have welcomed the regeneration but say the works have had a negative effect on business since they began this week.

Others expressed satisfaction with their efficiency, saying works in the past had taken too long.

The resurfacing project, taking place over the next five weeks, will cost about £300,000. It is funded by Transport from London and developer contributions.

http://www.eastlondonlines.co.uk/2012/02/brick-lane-to-lose-its-bricks-in-olympic-asphalt-repair/

Rebuilding History

Newspaper clipping kindly sent to me by Doug and Jane Eck from 'The Island Packet', Hilton Head Island.

The text below the picture reads, "Alan Frye of The Tradesmen Group uses a small saw Monday morning to remove the mortar between bricks on one of the historic walls surrounding original sections of the Beaufort National Cemetry. The work is part of the 850,000 Dollar project that will include rebuilding damaged wall sections and mortar joint and foundation repairs. the job will take about four months to complete."

Photo credits: Jonathan Dyer

What is sculpture?

Art Monthly 34, p45

October 2011, no. 350

Henry Lydiat

" Guidelines as to the legal meaning of 'sculpture' were handed down by the High Court Judge in the first trial, which were endorsed by the Court of Appeal, and were therefore subjected to argument and judicial review by the UK Supreme Court. They were approved and are summarised as follows:

- 'sculpture' can be things going beyond what one would normally expect to be art in the sense of the sort of things that one would expect to find in art galleries.

- no judgement is to be made on artistic merit

- not every three-dimensional representation of a concept can be regarded as sculpture

- the essence of a sculpture is that it should have, as part of its purpose, a visual appeal in the sense that it might be enjoyed for that purpose alone, whether or not it might have another purpose as well; the purpose of the creator, who may fail, but that does not matter (no judgements are to be made about artistic merit) because it is the underlying purpose that is important

- for example, a pile of bricks, temporarily on display at Tate Modern for two weeks, is plainly capable of being a sculpture; the identical pile of bricks dumped at the end of a driveway for two weeks of preparatory to a building project is equally plainly not; one asks why there is that difference, and the answer lies in having regard to its intention - one is created by the hand of an artist, for artistic purposes, and the other is created by a builder, for building purposes. "

From the Tate Archives...http://www.tate.org.uk/archivejourneys/historyhtml/people_public.htm

Wall Text

From Issue 141 Frieze Magazine: September 2011

WEEKEND SPECIAL: The brick as metaphor in South African art and writing

I arrive early for a press briefing and sit outside Berlin’s Martin-Gropius-Bau. Flipping through a magazine, I pause on Vladimir Nabokov’s account of his 1942 lecture tour of South Carolina. ‘The photograph has not been sent here,’ he writes to his wife Vera, ‘so it’s no surprise that the college was expecting a gentlemen with Dostoyevsky’s beard, Stalin’s moustache, Chekhov’s pince-nez and a Tolstoyan blouse.’ I look up and see workmen busy installing a wall-sized canvas print of the Berlin Wall, more or less on the spot where the wall once stood. A wall resembling and remembering a wall: weird, I think to myself, and return to Nabokov.

The press briefing for André Kertész’s retrospective is in French and German; his photographs, however, need no translation. One work in particular intrigues: made in 1933, the black and white image shows a neatly stacked pile of bricks. The arrangement, which predates Carl Andre’s famous exercise in equivalence by three decades, and speaks across time to a landscape study with bricks made in suburban Tangier by Yto Barrada in 2003, which I will see later in the day, fills almost the entire picture plane; the only marker of place is the Eiffel Tower in the corner. The bricks make me think of Ivan Vladislavic. (No, he isn’t Hungarian, nor does he have a Stalin moustache.) ‘The name is Croatian,’ explained the Johannesburg-based novelist and essayist in a 1999 interview. ‘My grandparents on my father’s side were Croatian immigrants.’ Vladislavic is one of contemporary South Africa’s most distinguished literary figures. His 2001 novel, The Restless Supermarket, a story about cosmopolitan entropy and the travails of proofreading, won the Sunday Times Fiction Prize. His most recent novel, Double Negative (2010), has been similarly fêted. The outcome of a collaboration with photographer David Goldblatt, the novel tells the story of Neville Lister, a morose youth whose encounter with a taciturn documentarian, Saul Auerbach, prompts him to become a photographer. Like much of Vladislavic’s writing, Double Negative immerses its reader in the idiosyncratic physical and psychic geography of Johannesburg. Here’s Lister, a late-blooming artist – and participant in Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin’s recent exercise in artistic subterfuge for the Krakow Photobiennial, ‘Alias’ – on his interest in photographing the city’s over-abundant walls: ‘As the walls go on rising, the character of the place grows more and more obscure [...] you think there is life behind one guarded façade or another, a mind behind the blank stare, but you cannot be sure.’

Walls and bricks have preoccupied Vladislavic since the get go. His first book, Missing Persons (1989), includes an amusing story of suburban paranoia, ‘Journal of a Wall’. Written at the fag end of apartheid, the unnamed narrator records seeing bricks being hurled at township buses on television; however, it is the immediate proximity of the brick wall across the road that compels him. ‘I went over just after midnight, in an overcoat, in a balaclava,’ the narrator tells. ‘I brought back with me a brick.’ Confronted by its ‘stony silence’ and ‘impenetrable skin’, he soon returns the pilfered building block.

Despite their standardized rectangular form and obstinate appearance, bricks are adaptable conveniences for Vladislavic. They can ‘inflict metaphor’, to repurpose a description he used in an early story. More prosaically, as he observes
in Portrait with Keys (2006), a collage of essayistic sketches of contemporary Johannesburg, bricks can function as ‘a doorstop, a weapon or a purse’.

The brick’s potential for violence, both actual and symbolic, should not be underestimated. ‘A passer-by had flung a brick through the plate-glass window and snatched some goods from the display,’ offers Vladislavic in Portrait with Keys, of a theft from a shop near his home. ‘The brick was still lying there among the dusty satin drapes, chrome-plated pedestals and handwritten price-tags. It was a wonderful brick, a model brick, with three round holes through it the size of coins, filled with chips of broken glass.’ The passage reads likes a deadpan description of an early work by Kendell Geers, Title Withheld (Brick) (1994–6).

Once you begin to look for them, bricks recur everywhere in South African art and writing. ‘He had been involved in a fight,’ writes photographer Santu Mofokeng in his 2001 monograph. Currently the subject of a touring European survey show, Mofokeng is recalling an incident from the 1980s, involving a Soweto friend, Vusi. ‘He stopped a brick with his head, knocked out cold.’ Goldblatt’s interest in bricks is more ideological than actual: apartheid was physically constructed into being. Unsurprisingly, the octogenarian photographer’s opus is packed with bricks. Sometimes they form a uniform backdrop for his portraits, other times they function as his explicit subject, as in his 1990 photograph of Abraham Thipe’s almost Andre-esque display of used bricks on a Johannesburg pavement. The photo predates by two years the action in Vladislavic’s short story ‘Propaganda by Monuments’. Boniface Khumalo, a tavern owner who has received news from Russian authorities that his request for a ‘surplus’ statue of Lenin has been approved, is walking past a demolition site in Pretoria. An old man is salvaging bricks. ‘Do you sell these things?’ asks Boniface. He is anticipating building a large plinth for Lenin’s head. ‘This rubbish belongs to no-one,’ the old man replies. ‘It is just lying here. You can see it yourself.’ Often, however, we don’t.

Sean O’Toole

is a journalist and writer based in Cape Town, South Africa.