theCOLAB presents ‘Performed object: fig. 09130123’, indolentia’ by Frances Richardson, our Women’s Work Commission 2023.  The commission is for an artist-woman at any stage of her career wishing to make her first or early outdoor sculptural work in response to the historical fabric or the idea of the Artist’s Garden.  Richardson describes The Artist’s Garden as a ‘small chink of space in the city, where you have nothing to do except watch shadows’.  The intense and intimate restoration/making process, use of unique materials and narratives of place coalesce in stillness in ‘Performed object: fig. 09130123’, indolentia’:  a work about time and taking time.

The process of making the work was characteristically deliberate and evolved over time.  The artist wandered physically and intellectually through both present and past time, recording her articulated thoughts and their context.  Unperceived in the tower of the nearby Temple Church, consecrated in 1185 by the Knights Templar, she heard the organist rehearsing a difficult passage ascending a minor scale. She described the music as ‘shifting slowly like a shadow progressing almost imperceptibly over an object’. 

From there, Richardson made her way to The Artist’s Garden where she sat down on one of the benches to take in the vast canopy of sky.  She realised that the uniqueness of this space is that nothing is demanded or expected here; it is a place where time seems to slow. 

She carried her thoughts and the suggestion of using one of the existing neglected benches with her to the medieval heart of Paris.  There, she contemplated the cool grey folds of fabric and delicate yellows of kneeling figures on the c.1500 grisaille windows at the Musée Cluny.  In one, the subject is a pilgrim being given rest and comfort on his journey, and in the other, lovers play a game of chess, their feet touching as he takes her Queen.  Richardson often makes links between the literary and the sculptural and she recalled Milan Kundera’s novella ‘Slowness’ (1995), in which he asks:

“Why has the pleasure of slowness disappeared? Ah, where have they gone, the amblers of yesteryear? Where have they gone, those loafing heroes of folk songs, those vagabonds who roam from one mill to another and bed down under the stars… There is a Czech proverb that describes their easy indolence by a metaphor: “They are gazing at God’s windows.”  A person gazing at Gods’s windows is not bored; he is happy. In our world, indolence has turned into having nothing to do, which is a completely different thing…”[1]

These ephemeral thoughts came together in material form during the long and intimate process of restoring, rethinking and reproposing a place of pause.  Richardson discovered the bench had survived well over 100 years due to its robust design and materials.  Made with teak slats from decommissioned naval vessels, and galvanized ironwork once bright green and proud, it was named in turn of the century sales catalogues as ‘the Foudroyant’.  But Richardson had no intention of restoring its ‘dazzle’.  As a Master Carver trained in Nigeria in the 1990s she is more than capable of doing so but her work is not about ostentation, but subtlety and the continuity of time and making. 

This Performed Object continues a body of work which incorporates a compelling material, Concrete Canvas, used in disaster relief zones to rapidly build shelters.  It is heavy, durable, resilient but in the artist’s hands resembles the lightness of soft folds of fabrics.  The manipulation of the material requires a dance of strength and delicacy, of knowing when to wait and when to move.  Its integration into the bench a coalesence of memory, thought, imagination and form.  By adding wheels, the sculptural bench becomes capable of being performed at each new encounter.  It is an itinerant work which moves across The Artist’s Garden each day and functions as furniture, a place of respite . It demands active participation in the positive sense of indolence, namely that of ‘freedom from pain’. 

‘Performed object: fig. 09130123’, indolentia’ encapsulates the seamless hard work and good judgement that goes into creating work of such simplicity, clarity and resolution.  It invites visual interrogation, touch and full integration of person and sculpture within time.  It is a quiet call to understanding what Kundera describes as the ‘secret bond between slowness and memory, between speed and forgetting’[2].

Further reading

Kundera, Milan, Slowness a novel, New York, 1995

Applin, Jo ‘If I measure I must exist’, exh cat, Karsten Schubert, 2021

Fullerton, Elizabeth, ‘Still Attached at all Four Corners’, exh cat, 2022

Endnotes

[1] Kundera, Milan, Slowness a novel, 1995, 1st edition, p3,  originally written in French as ‘La Lenteur’. 

[2] Ibid, p.39