Recording The Environment (2007) | Installation | Whitehall Waterfront 2007

Since graduating from Leeds Metropolitan University (now Leeds Beckett) I have spent much of my time curating, project managing and organising events and exhibitions by many other artists, occasionally, but not very often, including myself. ‘Recording The Environment’ is a work that I made pre-BasementArtsProject when I was the principal organiser / founder member of the Peripheral artist Collective (2005-2009). The Peripheral collective was a group of eighteen artists, all of whom worked for the Henry Moore Institute where I have worked since 2004. In 2007 I organised and curated my first large scale exhibition of work by members of the Peripheral group in a space known as Whitehall Waterfront here in Leeds. This space would, a year later, become Project Space Leeds and gain three permanent curators Pippa Hale, Kerry Harker and Diane Howse.

For my contribution to this project as an artist I decided to look at the environment in which I spent much of my working day: the Henry Moore Institute. Having spent some time playing around with various drawings, sound recordings, films and such like I landed upon the idea that I would try and give people a sense of what it is like to work in a place surrounded by other peoples art when you yourself are also an artist. Much of my time as a member of the Information Team and Senior Receptionist is spent telling people about the work of various artists, asking them not to touch things and directing them to other places of culture in the vicinity. It is also time spent observing, monitoring, protecting and learning about the work in order to be able to talk to the public about the exhibitions; always my favourite part of working in a gallery.

Something that has always been part of my objective as an artist is the idea of allowing a space in which people can contemplate the nature of art and how it is presented to us. My work at Whitehall Waterfront was constructed as a way of opening up what is normally a highly mediated space and allowing people to come to their own conclusions as to how they should, or are expected to, behave around artworks based on standard gallery rules.

‘Recording The Environment’ was a single installation made up of five individual works. The individual works were inspired by my surroundings at the Henry Moore Institute:

The idea behind ‘Stilled Life (Vox Populi Vox Dei)’ was a reference to the nature of being an invigilator in a gallery; on hand at all times to be able to give information and discuss work on any art related subject at a moments notice, yet also being able to then sit back like a spider in its web, quiet, blending in and waiting for that moment of activation. Vox Populi Vox Dei means the voice of the people is the voice of god and in this case the voice of the people is the means of activation and acknowledgement of the other presence in the room. The presence of the gallery invigilator is ultimately deemed necessary by peoples desire to visit the gallery. On the television placed on the floor within the installation is a recording made from underneath the chair outside Gallery 4 at the Henry Moore Institute. Walking around the Waterfront during the Peripheral exhibition you could hear the ambient sounds of the Institute, snatches of conversation, doors creaking, chairs scraping.

‘Temporarily removed from show’ was essentially an empty plinth, taken from the storage facility used by the Henry Moore Institute at Dean Clough. Many old plinths and such like had been stored there since the early days of HMI and it was at this point that the stores were being cleared out and I was able to avail myself of several plinths. Many of which - including this one are still in use at BasementArtsProject to this day. The plinth was cleaned up and then furnished with a notice informing viewers that whatever had been on the plinth, when it was in use by the Henry Moore Institute, had been temporarily removed from display. The plinth’ along with the flooring, the measurements of which corresponded to the dimensions of Gallery 4 at the Henry Moore Institute, was now the work itself serving only to suggest an alternate space across town on The Headrow.

The final piece entitled Neither Here Nor There involved three frames each containing a sheet of card painted, using a roller, in the same paint and using the same manner that the wall behind had been painted in. In two of the three frames a vague line drawing in pen depicting the outline of my body. The three frames echoed an incomplete arrangement of frames that had contained the work of Charlotte Von Poehl, whose work had recently been displayed in Gallery 4 at the Henry Moore Institute. Looking inside the frames it was impossible to tell if there was anything behind the glass or whether they were just empty frames hung against the wall, the texture and colour matching exactly it’s surrounding. Inside just a vague suggestion of my shadow outlined on the wall, or maybe not. My image; no more than a ghostly outline, ever present, but barely there.

The final act in this installation was to work out how to fix the laminate floor down in the space. This was a practical problem that was solved with one final element, the creation of a wooden frame and lip over the top edge which, when painted white formed a frame around the work on the floor. This became a literal frame in the sense that there were three framed pictures on the wall, but also a frame, usually reserved for the 2-dimensional, dropped to the floor and encasing the whole sculptural installation. The means for displaying the sculpture, the plinth, emptied of content and instead becoming the content of the three dimensional frame. Having spent a week installing this, and the work of 17 other artists my question now would be ‘how would people respond to this work?’

The opening night became an interesting exercise in observation and performance, the performance element unwittingly entered into by the visiting public who variously ignored or adhered to the rules of the gallery without instruction. Admittedly I had set up a scenario intentionally to create uncertainty. All of the labels in the installation were placed slightly too far into the work to be easily read by the viewer, this meant that in order to read the labels they would be forced to step into the frame and onto the floor. No indication was given that people could step in and no signs were added to say do not touch / step on the artwork. Over the course of the night came a myriad of responses; some would walk up and without pause walk into the work to look around, others would walk up stop at the edge and try to reach in without putting a foot onto the floor. Some would do this before looking around and gingerly stepping in, reading the label and quickly stepping out again in the hopes that no one had seen their action.

Sometimes during opening hours, when I was not invigilating at the Henry Moore Institute, I would go and invigilate the Waterfront space by sitting on the chair with my book and reading until a visitor came and stepped into the space. Even with me sat in the space people were still reluctant to enter. I would never volunteer an answer to an unasked question as to whether they could enter the space or not, I would always wait for the question before saying it was fine to step over the threshold. I spent many days invigilating the exhibition, quite often with my, at the time, two small children who had no qualms as to whether or not they could enter the work.

Looking back at this work from the vantage point of 2020 I can see this now as possibly a precursor to the whole BasementArtsProject idea. ‘Recording The Environment’ and BasementArtsProject both look at the more phenomenological aspect of art; how and where we experience it and whether or not that experience changes or entrenches people’s perception of how an artwork works. My own children have grown up with an interesting attitude towards looking at artworks in so much as they will never automatically try touching works, but will often ask questions about works where the intentions of the artist are less clear. Now they live in house in which every other month they are surrounded by different artworks by different artists with different rules and take quite an interesting view on what happens.

Bruce Davies | 2020