The Suitors (2015)

 

 

Credits

Timeline for the project:
Tests and preparations. Studio London, Winter 2014-15
Production.Statens Vaerksteder for Kunst. Copenhagen, Spring 2015
Final assembly and installation. Aarhus May/June 2015

A film documenting the work is in preparation:
Live footage from Tangkrogen and all film editing: Conor O’Callaghan
Still images from project development, production and final installation: Anders Rindom
Additional still images (Copenhagen only): Nicholas Imms

The film by Anders Rindom and Conor O’Callaghan should hopefully be completed before the end of the year.

To visit the website of Sculpture by the Sea at Aarhus, please use the following link: www.sculpturebythesea.dk

The Suitors’ is a project by Anders Rindom for the exhibition ‘Sculpture by the Sea’, which takes place every second year along the coastline from Tangkrogen to Ballehage at Aarhus in Denmark. The project was completed thanks to extensive support, both practical and financial from the organisers of the exhibition.

From the voiceover/ written introduction to forthcoming film:

It all began on the floor of my studio. I had laid out some cotton rags that had been dyed a little earlier. I picked them up one by one, folded and handled them just to see what would happen. What surprised me most was the way one very large rag tended to create heavy folds, simply as a result of having been soaked in the blend I had made from oil paint and casein glue. I also enjoyed when I saw what happened when I propped it up, using small branches secured to the floor with masking tape.

What happened next was that I dyed six more rags and arranged them according to their colour. They too had been dipped in my special mix, but this time around I had made certain the rags showed us the nice pastel tones I knew was possible to get from the earthy blend I had used earlier.

I arranged them in a near circle formation grouped around the large rag. They linked up nicely, but also appeared to be pulled towards the centre. It was as if they were dragged in, the same way, as planets can be when they circle a sun. I raised them above the ground, again using twigs and secured them at different heights to amplify the feeling.

Then something changed. The new batch of cotton snips suddenly took on the asset of images, started to appear like other objects: surgical swaps and sugar cotton both came to mind. This combination of danger with something sticky and sweet changed my first, very open-ended reading of them towards something quite specific: individuals circling and leaning over a form that is all wrapped up around itself. With its back turned, this soft shape appears to open up only away from their gaze, rejecting all interest and advances.
Memory no doubt played a part in how I took this forward. It certainly had my attention, but which way would it go? The small branches secured by masking tape felt like they could indeed be something much larger, real trees so tall that the pastel colours would float high up in the air. This sort of scale would however make the earth coloured rag a very large piece of cotton indeed, with an opening tall enough for children to enter its interior.

But where would something like this belong? In my mind I played around with a number of locations, but for some reason I kept coming back to the coast. When an invitation from Aarhus arrived in my inbox it felt like a gift, wrapped up in something that would prove to be quite a challenge.

©Anders Rindom 2015