Details: Briggs, Peter; Text: Baudson, Michel; CCC; Tours, France; 1992
LOSE THE OBJECT AND DRAW NIGH OBLIQUELY
Peter Briggs is sculptor, son of a botanist, English by birth, versed in the art of stereoscopic photography.
His roots are in England, he is much travelled in France and has an innate sense of observation. Withdrawal from society for him means moving off the beaten track, either along light-dappled woodland paths, selecting branches (so essential to his work), or in the studio where the tactile memory comes to the surface.
Living off the beaten track in this way has given rise a particular point of view to the botanist¹s eye, minimalism is too urbane; land art, despite the excellence of its long distance walkers, conjures up the back-of-beyond; the monochrome fades from memory; the sidelong glance, the oblique slips into oblivion.
Nothing would seem more normal than for this artist whose temperament encourages him to look around as he walks along, to know that there is no question of making sculpture without the necessary awareness of the third dimension that comes from a mobility of vision, without light and mass, on malleable materials worked regularly formed into the biomorphic shapes that flow automatically from the hand. He re-appropriates the energy and vigour of the growth of the branches, their curves and knots which, combined with different qualities of modelled waxes, are ultimately cast into bronze.
These sculptures are given a sense of scale and dimension by the intimate physical relationship which they establish with the sculptor: what he can form with his hands, carry in his arms, they derive from his detailed observation of the exact relief of the real world. They have a sense of human scale, both in their physical reality and in their understanding of nature whether it be wild or domesticated. They are hand-held, and trap the light in their immediacy of their contours, not only the light coming from the outside, but also that which comes from within: the light given out by molten metal in the crucible. The branches which form a part of many of these sculptures before being cast are turned upside down, their normal tropism is inverted, countered by modelled sections on the opposite side which rise and fall, a double visual circulation of forms is thus engendered. As such, they constitute the living memory of the activity of walking and gathering of branches: modelling not only coming from the accumulated memory of forces and tensions inherent in tree forms but also their ramifications pruned and cut into shape. Their vision of nature has captured the fleeting nature of light, the subtle play of light and shade and the extreme qualities of its natural chiaroscuro.
Once the choice of branches is established and the modelling of waxes in the studio is finished, the sculptures are cast, forming hearts and knots of metal, metaphorically retaining the memory of the luminiferous molten bronze. The plant kingdom is transmuted into the mineral one, the inverted branches become roots: from growing up, they now grow down; the traces left by modelling, finger prints are memorised and made permanent by the casting process.
Having hunted out the shapes and taken them in hand each sculpture is cast directly; no editions are made, no repetition is permitted, neither is the sculpture allowed to spill over into vacuous romantic excess. In order to espouse the true relationship between sculpture and nature the only thing that counts us the acid test of shapes and spaces seen and felt; the relief is directly tactile it is what links the apprehensible present to a hypothetical future. It is at this point that the need for the stereoscopic process makes itself felt, the wish to see relief through the cold black and white world of photography, before trying to understand its subtleties, its every nuance of light and shade.
If Peter Briggs¹ drawings can be considered as ?studies of guiding principles¹ then his photographs are an indispensable first corollary to the act of making sculpture.
The photographic image is worked as a sculpture a first overall glance, snapshot-like, is followed by gradual revelation of the third dimension which acts like a gradual discovery of an artwork, as it passes from concept to reality. This binocular desire refuses bleak frontality and surface attraction, belies the flat projection of perspective onto a plane and allows light to give full materiality to form. It thus shows the sense of three-dimensional space, allowing lateral and oblique views, underpinning the perception of the world in relief, realising the essence of seeing and what is seen.
These photographs, where one can project oneself into space created by stereoscopic vision and almost walk around inside, are paralleled by the ³wandering² search, the ongoing quest for branches, these selfsame branches that embody the relationship between the plant kingdom and the light which sustains and nourishes them.
This closely knit system questions the real integrity of the modernism in art which depends basically on the experience of reality as a tangible quality, and not on the theory and practice of its social and historical foundation. Peter Briggs¹ marginality uses these elements taken from the past and brings them to bear on contemporary practice.
His desire to use the stereoscopic process in parallel with his sculpture to double the eye with the hand, the virtual image with real perception, relief and light, that which is seen and that which is felt are all part of that which is to come, a time that will be marked by profound changes and metamorphoses in the art world, changes in which these first few years of the 1990¹s have in political, historical and economic areas been characterised by a series of regressive upheavals.
The perception of an increasingly large proportion of artists is that they no longer have or want to belong to the social corpus of the art world, implicated as it is in a system of global effectiveness and efficiency, and ever increasing productivity.
Peter Briggs has stood aloof from the triumphalist 1980s socio-historical context in all its media-conscious artistic and economic complexity (but a decade less triumphant when we look at creativity on an international scale). In other words he has avoided jumping into the last empty compartment in the gravy train, preferring to stay an artist rather than becoming an artworker adroitly following his personal shares in the great art market. Farewell the City of London, never mind about Paris centralisation, let the media look after themselves; the important thing is that his work has its true place in the tradition of biomorphic sculpture and that the synesthetic relationship between sight and touch be firmly established.
Briggs¹ art, by rejoining nature, proves itself to be a forward-looking contemporary vision, unlike museums and art history which only function within the shallow practice of the immediately perceptible.
MICHEL BAUDSON