Peering Under Rocks with Alan Franklin
joanna2023-11-27T19:22:27+00:00When I first met Alan Franklin in 2014, I had a gallery and he came to show us a portfolio of drawings. I remember being gripped by excitement because they were unexpected, new, witty and joyful to me. I don’t think I then fully appreciated the scope and depth of Alan’s practice, or took on board the thread of ideas that he has been able to sustain throughout the last 50 years. The thread is, in retrospect, apparent in the work he first offered up to his tutors on the Fine Art Sculpture course at St Martin’s, back in 1973, and you can still see it there in his most recent work.
In his own words, Alan allows his “curiosity to take the lead” and hopes at best, for a “surprise at the end”. He has learnt to rely on trust in the simple enjoyment of making and not worry about, or try to predict an outcome. Like a curious child on the beach ‘Peering Under Rocks’ is a metaphor for Alan’s approach to creating, providing a link with which we can connect together his created objects, currently on show in the main exhibition space at the Sewell Centre Gallery, Radley College, Oxfordshire. Curated by Amanda Jewell, the layout forces you to select how you wish to weave in and out of the various plinths or exhibits on the floor and walls, spanning the last 50 years of Alan’s practice. Each work in the exhibition makes you question what went on in Alan’s head for him to arrive at this conclusion, and Alan has helpfully provided an accompanying leaflet with short explanations. Take, for example, Still Life, 1985. He says: “On a Greek island I heard how a village up in the mountains had been rapidly vacated before a foreign invasion. I imagined empty houses still with furniture, curtains and tables laid. On visiting the village I found crumbling buildings and a few pieces of rusty metal including a tin helmet, the barrel of a rifle and the broken casing of a door lock. These surviving objects might one day be part of an archaeological jigsaw puzzle, collected and housed in a museum telling a story of another time.” Yet, in recreating some of these objects in red tin salvaged from petrol cans, the objects appear to be metamorphosing; growing claws and legs by which at any moment they might scuttle away.
His process was perhaps first set in place by his tutors at St Martins, and later remodelled through his own teaching practice. In 1973, students were expected to work out for themselves what sculpture was or what it should look like, be their own critics and set their own criteria. On the first day, he was handed a bag of clay and told to make something from it. He (and we) can still see that what he made was perfectly in line with what he is making 50 years later, led by the materials to hand. He graduated in the footsteps of artists who have since become giants in the contemporary art world: Richard Long, Barry Flanagan, Gilbert and George, Richard Deacon and Bill Woodrow, many of whom work in an unconventional and naturally instinctive way. Later, and whilst teaching a new BA Fine Art course that he had co-written, he would set a task for his students that was restrictive and abstract, such as ‘to make a piece of work using only a ball of string’ or it had to have ‘dimensions less than 5cms in any direction’ (‘something out of nothing’, he calls it).
Alan’s work, in tune with his teaching, became less representational around the year 2007 and took on a distinctly abstract quality. He says: “Working abstractly makes the work less conceptual and perhaps more playful, but it is still the search for surprise that leads the process.” Teaching has been integral to Alan’s own practice, and he says “how many times have I sat down with a student and stared at something I’ve never seen before or thought about, trying to unpick what’s going on and to extract meaning and merit. The student looks to you for what to do next and the best you can do is to keep asking questions.”
He managed to incorporate drawing into his practice around 2011 by thinking of his creations as flat sculptures with the process in evidence. He says, “The how, may at first be mysterious, but the clues are there for the drawing to be deconstructed.” After working out how to include drawing in his practice, he then considered how to make his sculpture more like drawings and paintings, concentrating on the ‘stuff of paint’ becoming the subject, as in PS#7, 2014. Humour in Alan’s work, which I find is very often there and particularly endearing, is never intended but just appears, “there it is again” he thinks, with an expression of surprise. Having disappeared into two-dimensions for a while, his most recent drawings are now taking on more physical depth and new materials are being used. If anything, they are becoming more tangled and less geometrical.
Alan certainly has a curious mind, and one that I wish I could consider mine an equal. Yet I sadly think my curiosity is considerably more restrained and less abstract, probably because I haven’t spent the last 50 years learning to release it. He rejects the idea that his work starts with any meaning, but I can see that the process of making is the uncovering of meaning. Meaning is there but sometimes it is outside of words and a lesson for us all. “Throwing up sticks to see where they land”, he often says. Well life has a habit of throwing at us that which is not planned, wanted or expected. If somehow we can go about our daily lives whilst managing to keep curious minds, limiting too much control, we are likely to encounter good and unexpected surprises too. So I stand back, applaud Alan’s arrival at this point, admire this review of his career and look forward to being gripped once again by the next new surprise.
11th November – 11th December 2023
The Sewell Centre Gallery, Radley College, Oxfordshire
Link to Alan’s artist page and some work I particularly like
