KEN GILL
The Phantom Stone Circle
"All things swim and glitter." Yet, it requires a special mind to see things as they are, this way, and, more, to be able to show them in this splendor of the real. Ken Gill attends in this way to the real. His habit is to look at things until they shed their skins to reveal themselves without labels or categories. His work is a record of shimmering identification with the relations of things to their places, a record of answers to questions he has posed to why things are the way they are, and to how they have found themselves where they are. As such, his work, whether in painting, drawing, frottage, or sculpture, embodies extended moments of meditation. This is most rare in a secular age. In earlier periods, this manner of quietly strenuous attention was represented in shining examples of belief translated into stone circles, temples, cathedrals, and the figures and ornament adorning these sacred spaces. This kind of art is, finally, a matter of incarnation, of making the invisible visible. Not only the religious mysteries, but the mystery of all things resides in this power: to present, and allow to be held in some concrete form, what we cannot otherwise conceive. In a secular age, we who look at paintings, read books and listen to music, reticent of all religions, don't quite realize how alive this need still is in us to respond to what it is that we cannot know, but yearn towards.
It is impossible to say what it is that predisposes or enables certain individuals to see through the surfaces of things as they are into the relations that make them so. We cannot inquire, but we respond, in deep appreciation, to the work, that unsettles us to the point of perception, to that instant just before things fall into place, fall into the neat categories in which we have grown used to keep what we see, and hear, touch, feel and breathe. True art is both restoration and discovery, restoration of the innocent eye of childhood through the discovery of how matter matters. Artists like Ken Gill participate in origins, showing us how the prime elements of our exquisite environment of fact, space, light, color, planes, ground, spheres and their variations as shadow, shade, shapes of rock, are all transformations of simple matter in some of its infinite possible recombinations. We end up seeing what we have always seen but never seen before, thereby extending the range of our perception, making us look and look again, and so learning to respect — literally "to look again" — at where we find ourselves in the immense and starling beauty of this universe whose order we catch only in these glimpses given to us through work like Gill's. "Spirit is matter reduced to an extreme thinness." To accomplish this reduction is the task of the artist.
Naomi Brandel, a ceramicist and writer, visited Gill in his studio in Ballydehob while he was at work on the frottages. She describes the scene and her experience in a way that makes this point about the reduction of matter to spirit most effectively, while providing an invaluable insight into Gill's method.
She found him surrounded by his phantom stones and goes on:
Lengths of paper lie on the floor, the discarded skins from yesterday's work.
The high wall is hung with images, each between five or six foot high, taken from the Dunbeacon stone circle. These are rubbings - or `frottages' - the results of covering each stone in turn with paper and pressing a roller, laden with black ink, over the length of it. It is a kind of three dimensional tracing, where the raised form emerges in gradations from broken grey to black; whilst the indented form, eroded over the centuries by the elements, shows up pale, like a photographic negative.
Ken tells me he works these images on site. He always begins by acquainting himself with the stone, running his hands over its surface, sensing volume, its individuality. On a windless day, the paper is held into position by tape and the roller run across its length and breadth from top to bottom. Finally, artistic sensibility takes over and following his intuition, the roller is used more like a brush, leaning into concavity, emphasising some parts more than others, to accentuate rhythm and volume. The paper must be thick enough so that the ink used to pick up the form cannot seep through.
On seeing the surface of a stone stamped onto hanging paper, the first impression is of something levitated, something that's left the earth behind. It takes a moment to adjust to the lack of gravitas; to do without that familiar quality of earth that draws us to stone, rock, bolder. Ken fetches one of his three dimensional pieces, pulls it across the floor to stand in front of a rubbing. Like the frottage, this is a copy of form made by wrapping wire mesh round the whole stone and pressing it in to create a mold of the outer shape. The wire stone stands, weighted by a lead-like base. Its counterpart, the 'disembodied' stone, suspended behind.
Something shifts in me, the viewer. Asked to give up my expectations of gravity, I am now being shown stone as transparence: a permeable, aerated boundary with holes in it. Visually, the three dimensional stone is becoming both light and lighter. It has something of the quality of dandelion clocks or the stretched feathers of a gull's wing, white against the sun. If I lean to one side, the light catches different parts of the wire impression. I try the other direction. And again, the shape shifts: the stones shifting shape; with the viewer, any viewer - you, myself - as shape-shifter. We are seduced by the playfulness of the image to do what any boulder must long for if longing is possible for them) - to move.
We — the wire shape and the viewer — enter slowly into this duet. I move and the shape moves, too. I move and the shape reveals. I am looking through surface into internal form, the hollowed out centre, itself an echo of the outer shape. At the bottom, rooting it to the ground, is the huge footprint of the flat base. This is the point at which the stone has landed. The mark where it enters the earth — or, reversing the image, the scab where the stone broke through. Taking it further, it is also the point where the stone disappears underground, much like the growing point of a plant, that thickening where the roots begin their descent. As above, so below. We can intuit the hidden extension of the stone, descending into the earth, as ballast for the half that rises up....
The Artist's stones: impressions of wire, portraits of surface. We let go of weight and volume. And the third dimension which we can never see. Who has ever seen the back of a stone before, whilst standing at the front? We have taken on — with the artist's help — a stone's translation into light, light in weight and light of the air. Through this work the hidden is revealed to us. Nothing is not true. Nothing inaccurately seen. Nothing here is superstition. And yet the frottage and forming images before us weigh the anchor of matter.
Since that first moment when we felt the familiar become the unknown, we have been taken on a journey. Our reality shifts. And, like the artist's stones, what we experience is a kind of ascension.
Gill's dialogue between visible and invisible is equally evident in the paintings that complete the Portrait of a Stone Circle, Products of his extended attention over the last two years, 1997-99, these are complex canvases, slowly built-up with overlays of silver leaf, paper, and other textures to make intricate surfaces before the laying down of images. Through these images, revealing themselves in elements transformed, we feel the pull of forces that link us, as the link in the paintings figures, to "nothing that is not there and the nothing that is."
Prof. Joan Richardson
THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK