F. Eight Houses of
In 2015, starting with the production of eight bases cut from a piece of salvaged timber, I decided I would make some works that were more overtly architectural than the sets of models I had been making post 2007. Inventing and rejecting a few alternative ideas, I settled on a collection of refurbished titles which had antecedents over a decade old, and which had variously been called either temples or chambers. They now manifested under the rubric of ‘House of …’ as it seemed a term of greater ambiguity and flexibility. As previously, and subsequently, the entertainment of generating titles results in excess.
Ruminations about titles draws attention to the reality that the title provides a broad brief for the work. Having decided to build something with a given title, in each instance I needed some concept of what one might be if I was to make a model at least loosely deriving from it. This was more-or-less a return to the strategies I employed in the Prelude set of pavilions.
The architectural input varied from exploring a period of architecture – for example Arts and Crafts – to quotes from particular buildings, to deriving characteristics from one building or type. Mostly the title preceded any form-giving, but there were also instances of formal ideas in search of a title or evolving and refining together.
33 House of Ornate Temptations
For this model, I sought ideas in architectural elements employed in Baroque and Rococo churches. I was thinking of excesses. The elements of interest became increasingly abstracted as attempts at literal borrowings seemed inevitably clumsy. There was a limit to the number of the gold falderals I could produce and incorporate. Time spent in Bologna, Padua, and Verona in September and October 2015, and then in Seville, Cordoba, and Granada in November 2016 augmented some ideas. This was a model that always seemed difficult, as attested to by its stretched construction duration.
I had initially thought of Bernini’s 1624-1633 Baldacchino in St Peter’s Basilica, Rome. Our trips produced many other examples, such as the Ciborium by Vignola (late 17th century), in the Basilica San Petronio, Bologna. The end result derived from these is a somewhat distorted shape forming the roof. The supporting columns are likewise far-fetched constructions of red copper-wound brass – well-removed from the twisted barely-sugar columns in Rome.
The Basilica de San Juan de Dios, Granada, was a remarkable unexpected find – perhaps the most encrusted and golden interior display of over-Baroqueness I have experienced, especially the camarin above the altar and viewable from the nave below. Marion and I were invited to visit this remarkable mirrored, golden space which dates from the middle of the Eighteenth Century.
I played with golden (shiny brass) and rich red (dyed lace) elements along the way in an effort to evoke the levels of excess I was seeking. This was reduced to brass and silver rods which initially derived from an image imbedded in my mind of the light burst in gold in Bernini’s ‘Ecstasy of St. Teresa’ in the Cornaro Chapel, Santa Maria della Vittoria, Rome (around 1650) – a work illustrated in my prescribed school art survey text and subsequently hovering in my store of visual imagery.
The walls, too, had antecedents in the Baroque and Rococo: the curves in the inner layer of walls in the Wieskirche (1745-54) – the Bavarian pilgrimage church we walked to in 1985 lurks in the corners of my mind, along with the façade of Borromini’s San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, Rome (from 1638 to 1677), or the façade of Chiesa di Santa Maria Maddalena, Rome, c.1735. These two buildings are separated by a century; my forming of four small walls is consistent with approaches in vogue in some corners of architecture two and a half centuries later.
Surreptitiously, all this elaboration sits on a base made of four parts alluding to the floor of Notre-Dame de Chartres cathedral, where its famous labyrinth (probably from early in the 13th century) has four lines dividing the path on the journey to the centre rosette. There are also transparent columns (potentially eliding those from all periods of architecture) which describe a central lenticular nave.
Base: 123mm x 102mm. Model: 123mm x 107mm. Height: 91mm.
Initiated: Late August 2015. Constructed: 11 July 2016 – 23 June 2017.