Dec 10

Dec 10 Guy Haddon Grant — In the Sculptor's Studio

When I enter Guy Haddon Grant’s studio, he takes my rucksack and puts it down on an old shirt. Everything else is covered in dust, he says. The dust is undoubtedly evident, a thin layer covering books, brushes, power tools, and furniture. The only exception is an elegant, long-legged chair, its polished wood back shining like an architectural intervention near the entrance of the space. From here, the artist or his visitor can sit and survey the room, raised just above ordinary eye level. It’s like a studio from a golden age of sculpture designed in the European style. Everything is monochrome as if the whole room is an old photograph brought to life. It reminds me of the mythologized ateliers of Giacometti and Brancusi.

The ceiling is very high, and the light comes in obliquely through skylights, suffusing the space with brightness. There are molded heads resting on shelves, an enormous canvas, bags of plaster, spare wooden plinths, hand-written notes inscribed directly onto the walls. Sketches and snapshots throng a noticeboard, and a ladder leads precariously against a mezzanine, where more images are half tucked out of sight. In the corner, a near life-sized hunched figure reveals its plaster insides where its surface has been damaged. It stands behind a group of more recent pieces - grand works in white and black, raised on thin stands and simple wooden plinths. These totemic pieces evoke a slippery sense of personhood, sliding between abstraction and figuration. They bring life by their inescapable presence.

Cover image: Courtesy of Roman Road and the artist, © Ollie Gordon

The foundational myths surrounding the studios of artists such as Giacometti, Brancusi, and Bacon (all immortalized as museum pieces, or in the process of becoming so) often ironically distract from the day to day realities of working in a studio. In 1960, Alexander Liberman published "The Artist in His Studio," in which he conveyed his visits to the studios of famous artists through text and documentary-style photographs. In the well-known section dedicated to Giacometti, Liperman's presentation of the studio is loving and detailed, creating an image of Giacometti as a sculptural genius inextricable from the studio in which he worked: "He smokes incessantly. Hundreds of cigarette butts litter the floor. When he sculpts, there is more movement and abandon. He seems to dance around the emerging form. His arms sway wide to add by touch the substance that will be formed. […] The walls are scratched and scribbled on as though some cave painter had tried to capture images in this cavern."

Giacometti comes across as a 'first man' figure, an inaugural art-creator working from instinct, passion, and masculine energy. (In contrast, Liperman's sexist description of the artist's wife Annette both presents her as a passive observer and likens her to a fourteen-year-old girl). The details of the images created by Liberman seem to document the 'truth' of the studio life, positioning the photographer as an unobtrusive and objective fly on the wall. Unexpectedly, many of the images from the book were first published in women's lifestyle magazines such as Vogue, reinforcing the idea of women as consumers and men as producers.

Anyone who has visited a sculptor's studio will realize that the book shows little of the labor involved in Giacometti's practice, carrying bags of clay, for instance, or mixing up the plaster. Instead, the physical forms of the sculptures seem to emerge from Giacometti's mind rather than from his hands or materials – the artist is shown in contemplation far more frequently than he is shown working. Liberman suggests that, for Giacometti as for most great artists, sculpting is a primarily intellectual rather than practical or bodily act.

And yet the book overlooks the artist's concern with achieving 'likeness' – not only in representing a human figure but in recreating the experience of seeing it – an experience which is as much about the relationship between two bodies as it is about theoretical philosophy. As Jean-Paul Sartre puts it, "Giacometti has restored an imaginary and indivisible space to statues. In accepting relativity from the very start, he has found the absolute. This is because he was the first one to take it into his head to sculpt man as he appears, that is to say, from a distance." Giacometti's standing or walking figures appear to be both near and far from the viewer; they force the viewer into a vital confrontation with the known and the unknown.

Courtesy of Roman Road and the artist, © Ollie Hammick

While Liberman's book sketches an image of Giacometti and other modernist male artists as embodiments of a quasi-prehistoric, inherently masculine force of generative art-making, recent scholarship has suggested that some of the earliest known representations of the human form were produced by women - in particular, the prehistoric "Venus" figure, to which Guy Haddon Grant repeatedly returns for inspiration whenever he reaches a transition point in his work. These totemic objects of veneration from Palaeolithic cultures (the earliest of which were created up to 35,000 years ago) are imbued with a dynamic notion of personhood. Through their identification with the sacred, their allusive evocation of human form, and the interplay of the object with the space around it, they emit a sense of sculptural presence despite their small size.

The traditional academic view has been that these figures are exaggerated visions of the female body, made grotesque by male sculptors who use their gendered gaze to fetishize women's sexual features. However, revisionist interpretations have suggested that these may, in fact, be self-representations by women; rather than adopting an external viewpoint, these figurines may represent what a woman can see what she looks down at her own body – and embodiment of a personal perspective. Like in Giacometti's figures, this exploration of perspective and human vision – representing things as they are seen – gives these sculptural objects their power and insistent presence.

As I am speaking with the artist in his studio, I realize that the practical realities of working in this specific space – tall but relatively narrow, full of sculptural materials, poorly insulated – affect the type of work he produces significantly, as well as the physical make-up of his finished works. For example, he sometimes uses chunks of polystyrene, incorporating them into the plaster surface and structure of a sculpture. The effect is aesthetic, but the cause is located in practicality: the tall, slim sculptures can quickly become top-heavy, and it is difficult for the artist to move them by himself. Incorporating the lightweight plastic into the works makes them easier to manipulate in the studio, allowing him to rearrange them without assistance.

Haddon Grant regularly works with plaster, a material with a long tradition in sculpture. Rather than using the substance to make casts, however, Haddon Grant often applies it directly to the artwork, exploring how the material creates its own conditions of making. After mixing the plaster powder with water (creating a thicker paste than is usual), he uses a paintbrush to apply the plaster mixture to a piece. Initially, it is pliable enough to be molded with hands or brush, but it soon starts to harden through a chemical process that makes it hot to the touch. After ten minutes or so, it solidifies completely, and can only be cut using a chisel or a mechanical saw.

In this way, the conditions in which the piece is made and the materials used come to determine the outcome of the sculpture and can be seen as defining elements of Guy Haddon Grant’s creative practice, where the processes of the studio are imprinted into the aesthetics and meanings of the exhibited works. This practice is not only productive and individualistically generative. It is also reactional and responsive to place, material, idea, and previous works.

Many of Haddon Grant’s recent works also demand a response from their audience, playing with the viewer’s vision and sense of perspective. In the cloud totems, for instance, the matt black of the charcoal coating absorbs light, making it hard to see the details of the surface from a distance and frustrating viewers’ attempts to grasp the work’s form in a single glance. Elsewhere, the roughness of the white plaster figures, and their unexpected elongation, similarly make viewers question their depth perception and sense of scale. He has also explored how to challenge the eye in the visual transition from two dimensions to three dimensions, making drawings that evoke sculptural depth, for instance, or sculptural works made up of 3D drawn lines.

Seeing the works together in the studio reinforces the critical role that context plays when looking at Haddon Grant’s work. It gives an understanding of his path from figurative portraiture to abstracted cloud forms, as well as providing reference points to other artists, modes of working, abandoned experiments, and the relation between different elements of his practice (e.g., drawing and sculpture).

This contextualization – created semi-consciously in the photogenic studio – is alluded to in Surrender, Haddon Grant’s solo exhibition at Roman Road. From his earlier figurative busts to his totemic abstractions, to recent works that demonstrate his creative confidence in re-incorporating elements of figuration into primarily abstract forms, the exhibition draws together works from across the course of the artist’s career.

In a 1979 essay, Daniel Buren conceived of the studio as a permanent place in which portable artworks are created, and which is the only place the artwork truly belongs. The paradoxical nature of art created in the studio – which is most non-performative art – is that it must be removed from the studio to be seen by the viewer. With a nod to this strange paradox, Guy Haddon Grant’s person-like abstractions, his abstracted figures, occupy a liminal zone – between personage and object, between studio and gallery, between external and personal perspectives. They seem to belong neither here nor there; or, rather, they belong both here and there.

Born, at least in part, from the practical realities of the studio, they become present in its physical environment. And yet they simultaneously come into being through their materials and processes of making, which are inextricably bound up in the production of sculptural form and meaning. Then again, they arise from the context of Haddon Grant’s career, from his early mastery of mimetic technical expertise and his existential drift into the waters of abstraction. Additionally, their power and presence are partly derived from their formal exploration of perspective and their relationship to the viewer’s vision.

There is no single origination myth that can be expounded. Haddon Grant’s works are continually evolving, with a perspective that is never entirely resolved. Individually static, his pieces play out a quiet dance. They are moved around the studio, occasionally leaving, sometimes returning again, forming new relations with other figures, both human and sculptural. The artist and the viewer are both engaged in this dance of forms, side-stepping or circumnavigating, sitting at a distance before looming closer. The dust on the studio floor is disturbed and scuffed. It never settles.

Guy Haddon-Grant: Surrender
Roman Road, London
07 November–14 December 2019

Installation views:

Guy Haddon-Grant: Surrender, installation view, Roman Road, London, 07 November – 14 December 2019. Courtesy of Roman Road and the artist. © Ollie Hammick

Artist studio views:

Guy Haddon-Grant, artist studio view, London, 2019. Courtesy of Roman Road and the artist. © Ollie Gordon

Further reading:

Daniel Buren, “The Function of the Studio”, trans. Thomas Repensek, October, no.10 (Fall 1979)

Jens Hoffmann (ed.), The Studio: Documents of Contemporary Art (London: Whitechapel Gallery, 2012)

Alexander Liberman, The Artist in His Studio (New York: Viking Press, 1960)

LeRoy McDermott, ‘Self-Representation in Upper Paleolithic Female Figurines’, Current Anthropology, Vol. 37, No. 2 (April I996)

Brian O’Doherty, Studio and Cube: On the Relationship between Where Art is Made and Where Art is Displayed (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007)