Oliver Barratt, Thinking Aloud — Sevenoaks School Sculpture Trail

Thinking Aloud, Oliver Barratt, 2014

thinking aloud – in conversation

Oliver Barratt in conversation with Rachael Campbell – Johnston, Chief Art critic for the Times, 14 Sept 2014.

RCJ

I first met Oliver during the installation of his Everest Memorial at base camp Mount Everest, on Nepal. He worked in indomitably, very high-altitude, intense cold, we all then tracked down the mountain after weeks and of course the crew and the rest of us are dying to go out for a beer and a curry. I went and knocked on Oliver’s door and I don’t know if any of you know The Holbein painting of the dead Christ, it is a beautiful painting, but it is not how you want to see your friend and the subject of your times interview ending up. It took three days until he resurrected, you were pale and thin and exhausted, so it is lovely to see you looking so healthy and strong and floral.

Looking at thinking aloud one is immediately struck by how amazingly organic it is, as if it comes straight from life, It feels as if the sculptor has looked at something, I don’t know quite what it is? Is it a vegetable form, is it the dance of a gnat above water, is it two people dancing around each other. How much do you look and abstract from something literal?

I hope to keep the mimetic at bay. A particular reference would be a type of failure. The intellectual craft of the work is allowing references to perpetually be on to the tip of your tong, it’s there but not quite there, to not let one image dominate another, it is quite literally thinking aloud. There are points of reference for example the flame, the flickering image of the fires of the Zoroaster temple, formless but full of energy, or the neuron flickering with communication in the darkness of the brain. One thing joints to another that leads to a third connection and doubles back on a tangent to join where you didn’t quite expect it. They are however deeply intuitive and I have to work hard to keep the intuition at the front of decision-making.

RCJ

So in the way that artists like Barbara Hepworth’s abstraction purely can be traced back to a visual reference, to a rock or a pebble, you want to escape that part of your abstract inheritance

Yes. I want to escape it in order to negotiate and more complex set of imaginings

RCJ

So when did you title that work? For although the sculpture does not reference thing, it does to me evoke very accurately, idea of thinking. The way that a thought flows and then it lumps, gets fatter and then it is attenuates. Did the title come after the piece?

Mostly they do, but on this particular piece it did not.

RCJ

I see, so you really were thinking aloud as you did it.

It was certainly about the process of thinking, but also a type of cheeky node to the ambiguity of the title, thinking aloud or you are allowed to think. So that at the heart of this campus, an institution that is dedicated to learning, there was an emblem enshrining validity of the imagination and respecting the role of open-minded free and liberal thought.

RCJ

I also want to think about the subject which has perhaps become the subject of all sculpture since we stopped making men on horses and monuments to air men, which is the articulations of the space around the sculpture being as essential as the sculpture itself. What you haven’t made is as important as what you have made, And the people who walk around it, the pupils and teachers and visitors all have a role in making a sculpture work. They make it by perambulating it.

Yes, and in particular with this piece, it has an almost breathing quality as you walk around. From someone angles it becomes thin and holds itself inwards, at other points it opens out and becomes more expensively generous. It is about its full three dimensionality and how one circumnavigates its form, and how the work spills into the space around, a type of visual rippling into the environment. It is deliberately designed without a single perspective and articulates change within its unity as you walk around it.

RCJ

Tell me a bit about the colour. It’s a much richer colour than I was anticipating. Hey Marigold colour, it’s very eastern colour. There is something a bit mystic about your work. It’s a sort of Hindu colour.

I do think about it but I have no idea what it is. There is definitely a metaphysical quest is in the work

RCJ

In all your work.

Yes. In all my work. It’s about how we pass through experience, how we passed through time, how we pass through space, The intrinsic nascence of all things, they are in one state and becoming another and although some things seem more solid and permanent than others all is subject to change. As T. S. Eliot puts it in Four Quartets “ a slow rotation subjecting permanence “ and I suppose that’s a sort of mystical contemplation

RCJ

That is quite apposite one for a school.

They are all profoundly optimistic works, it is not a state of existential despair that this nacients inspires but a wonders delight in the energetic throughput of life, forming, consolidating and decaying, and this vibrant orange is perhaps the most optimistic of all

RCJ

What about the materials that you use for the sculpture. You think very clearly at the beginning of process about surface and material and form, you have shown us that you sculpt out of plaster, The finish is highly smooth almost Glass Bowen in its surface. Its surface has got something glidie about it which you cannot have seen when you first started shaping it with your hands, do you envisage that, did you know you were going to render fine surface when you started?

Yes. The precision of surface is to do with accuracy, clarity and delineation. The origin of the work is in a loopy reverie, it is a deliberate oxymoron where a form that is liquid and ill defined, is highly plotted and realized in its surface. That polarity, I find fascinating and imbues the work with a type of energy. It is as if I am able to say, this is exactly how I want a loose intuition to be.

RCJ

Despite the obvious Moore / Hepworth tradition that this is coming out of, this is a very forward looking for work, you are thinking about sculpting with light, The work could be absolutely intangible, it could almost be made with laser lights or smoke.

Yes, I like the implicit contradiction of making something transitory and ephemeral, solidified into bronze the great material of sculpture permanence, and in so doing asserted itself on that thought even the thought itself is open and loose.

RCJ

You play with modern ideas and yet you route them back in the past. Are you deliberately trying to do that? Wouldn’t them in something which is unfashionable, which is the idea of the meaning. What do you think of post-modernity, do you avoid it?

Yes I do avoided it. I see a lot of post modernist theory as fairly flimsy, yet critical to understanding contemporary debate, but I see myself as un reconstructed modernist, by which I mean that I believe that art has a rich social, even utopian role in transforming our vision of the world.

I believe in meaning, but I also think that the meaning is profoundly transitory.

RCJ

There is ultimately meaning there, whereas post-modern theory holds that there is an endless contested marketplace of meanings that plays on the surface. Yet you play endlessly with the surface of your material?

Yes because meaning might just flick across the surface of the polished form and fleetingly, but with magnified clarity be glimpsed as it disappears off into the distance.