PONDICHÉRY, 2004
AFFICHAGE
Like any dedicated art, Peter Briggs' new works on paper suggest much of what has led to them, not always by obvious references or borrowed techniques but often by the spirit of the many influences that have shaped his work. The sensitive viewer will be led on the many journeys that Peter has travelled. There is the journey of modelling, embarked upon in 1982 as a kind of exercise to loosen up his fingers, which were stiff from carving big stone sculptures. Modelling involved myriad textures, temperatures and tools, and perhaps most importantly, the relationship between light and the surface.
Since nobody has written on the scientific research done on how the obsession of touch works, on how touch and vision mix up together, in relation to nineteenth and twentieth century sculpture, it is something each artist has had to work on and theorise by himself. We see with three dimensions - with two eyes and our perception - what the French call objet intersensoriel or sensus communis, as da Vinci first termed it. When we are looking at a glass for instance, our eye looks at the glass and assumes a number of things - the shape, the touch - and it therefore forms an object in our brain. If we have something perfectly smooth, we never know where we are on it, points out Peter. So in his sculpture, he used to make or leave little sharp bits, as tactile landmarks. Tactile memory works differently from visual memory; it will only work inasmuch as it's a path, the way Braille writing works, we go along a line and the next... To remember shape, we have to keep our hand moving in order to situate ourselves in relation to the whole. For Peter, modelling is partly making shapes, partly to do with pressure and partly to do with moving his hands over a surface; it comes comme une crise de boutosn - a persistent habit that he fears may be a bad one, because it is so concerned with the private self, a possible form of occupational therapy.
Realising that his work was only addressing itself to a very few people, Peter started ink drawings as a way of getting out of modelling, of putting in place a situation where he can communicate with people, who can recognise and presume quite a lot of things that in fact he wants them to presume. These most recent works are also a way of removing volume, making his art inframince. Yet, modelling and working with three dimensional matter has proved to be a ubiquitous influence. The drawings represent a theoretical model of what the skin of a sculpture would look like, like a snakeskin, but it doesn't necessarily correspond to what's inside it. It can be flattened out because it's elastic. In order to put things where he wanted them, Peter has allowed a degree of cartographic license. There are a number of ways we can move around a surface. There's always the problem of left or right symmetry, which is very different from circumferential symmetry - an important aspect of sculpture that Peter has partially transferred on paper. The original drawings were executed in diluted ink on absorbent paper because Peter liked to see the ink spread. To inscribe means to write or draw within, into wax in particular - which is very incisive. Peter's line is the opposite of the inscribed line; uninhibited, it occupies like a river spreading out and flooding - something that has a lot more to do with surface and a lot less to do with line.
When Peter cast sculptures, a piece of wooden twig with modelled wax around it disappeared in the casting process to transform into bronze. This process triggered a curiosity about grafting, which in turn led to his using a book filled with rigid, diagrammatic drawings. He'd tear pages out and use parts of the drawings; little branches coming out in a V were grafted into a loop. Therefore, what he did with the pages was directly related to the pages' content. Another source of Peter's inspiration has been subterranean caves and cave temples, the idea of working with space going from inwards to outwards, taking existing matter from the inside outward...
These initial experiments worked themselves into a whole series of collages until he got quite proficient at gluing. Then a combination of events and a desire to improve his graphic quality led to Peter making prints in the manner of Chinese brass rubbings. Using marble slabs, he sandblasted away the bits he didn't want to print with the aid of a computer, inked his slabs and transferred his drawings to paper, with the intention of making cutouts A chain of varied experiments led to the present works being a synthesis of the initial experience of free drawing; printmaking, in the sense that the current drawings can be reproduced in numbers and because they are detachable, they are also reminiscent of the printmaker's action of placing a matrix on paper by using registrations; and indirectly sculpture, because of the transferred idea of modelled matter and space. An integration of the creativity of the hand with the uniformity and the bulk reproduction that mechanical and electronic processes facilitate, these works are derived from his small drawings, enlarged considerably by a computer, allowing him to re-inject detail, even model the drawings and also create stencils from adhesive paper.
The bigger works in the series have an interactive element. Rather like signs, they can be stuck on all kinds of spaces. In their numbers and because they can be glued and unglued with some ease, they are quite egalitarian. But Peter's art is not merely the art of technique. It fundamentally involves concept and in fact, the preoccupation with technique reflects his innate desire to execute his concepts to the highest degree of perfection that is possible, given the complexity of what he is trying to achieve.
The smaller drawings are pasted on to pages of two books, one on graphology and the other filled with tailor's diagrams, that he found in a flea market in Tours. He immediately recognised that they were perfect for his work because he needed something diagrammatic and flattened out. Tailor's diagrams have something of the same quality ? of surface being opened out, like an article of clothing is laid out flat. There's something of entomology too, of insects with pins through them, with their feet glued and spread out. The pages of writing from the graphology book though, have much more to do with the way the drawings were made in the first place - the way ink blots, the way it can dry up unexpectedly, a subjective manner of looking at writing... Peter has been equally subtle in superimposing each drawing on a script that reiterates the character of his image. In the use of these books, creep in an autobiographical element - his father was an entomologist and his uncle kept a bookshop.
A new departure for Peter's art might involve making and using different kinds of paper in numerous ways. Even as he puts up his work here, he is in the process of making works with an antique French-English dictionary made with cotton paper. The pages, torn up into tiny pieces and mixed together, will make new, bilingual paper. Reflecting his own bilingual heritage, they are again reminders of how powerfully art is related to life.
Aurogeeta Das Pondicherry, 2004.