Capped by Steven Allbutt
South Square Gallery, 2 February – 2 March 2008
The artist studio is often seen as a solitary space of contemplation and creation, a physical or virtual space in which the artist determines the nature and outcome of ideas and concepts. Steven Allbutt’s work has recently begun to evolve in a much more responsive and challenging space. In preparation for his current solo show he has built a makeshift hydroponic lab inside the bedroom of his house. An interesting choice perhaps, for the ‘growing’ of ideas, the small room has an immediate sensory effect; it is moist, fragrant and encompassing. Allbutt’s studio has become a rose garden, a body of work in the form of living, growing flora that will extend and adapt itself to the main gallery space at South Square Centre.
Interested in the forms and processes of artificiality, Allbutt has cultivated a brood of repeat roses that normally flower in March and June, completing their cycle in October. The artist has nurtured them to prematurely bloom through the winter months, using hydroponic technology involving hoses, special lighting, reflective mylar, insulated troughs, and dedicated, laborious attention. For Capped Allbutt has chosen to harness these tools and procedures as a form of intervention into the processes of nature, a synthetic gesture that both nurtures and manipulates. In turn, the roses make formal and aesthetic choices of their own, growing and sprouting leaves and buds at will. In a sense, artistic practice here becomes a conversation and a battle of wills between the artist and his subject, with an unstable tension looming over the final presentation.
Allbutt has chosen to incorporate the technique of ‘capping’ as a way to explore ideas around artificiality and growth. In Sapa, North West Vietnam where the artist has made two separate visits since 2002, the custom for flower farmers is to delicately wrap the buds of rosebushes with newsprint and string before cutting and selling them in the marketplace. Before purchase, buds are unwrapped to elicit a healthy and full bloom. The process of capping then represents a holding back of potential, form, and of growth, which is reliant upon a small and important window of time when buds are on the delicate border of blossom. The artist applies this method as a way of addressing the power of memory to determine the moment of surfacing of latent experiences and thoughts. A sense of repressed memory is captured in the suspended moment of each capped rosebud. Allbutt experiments with control over memory; he caps his roses and chooses the moment of their release.
Artist Anya Gallaccio has explored the symbolic and material qualities of roses in her Red on Green (1992) at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. She clipped the heads of ten thousand roses and covered the gallery floor with a thick carpet of blooms and stalks that slowly decomposed over the period of the exhibition. Both artists use the rose as medium to create a sensory environment within the gallery space, re-appropriating its aesthetic and formal values within the context of contemporary art. Gallaccio’s rose installation can be interpreted as a poetic metaphor of lost love and the process of decay, whereas Albutt creates a space of live growth that requires attentive nurturing to ensure its survival. The processes of capping and pruning allow for repeat flowering, referring to a history of cultivation and renewal that relies heavily on the artificial exploitation of living forms.
Sculpturally, Allbutt’s rosebushes act as an installation, determined by a careful configuration of strings suspending their branches upward. Each bush will grow to a different shape and form, producing an indeterminate number of buds throughout the exhibition period. By nature the roses will never outgrow the confines of their designated space. Somewhere in between the delicate and focused manipulation of the artist and the unnatural growth of the rosebushes, one can sense collaboration through resistance and provoked response. Through a slow and gradual architectural elaboration, Capped investigates the potential of an imposed structure to act as an enabling force. Allbutt’s installation repositions the relationship of artist to material, and of object to subject, inviting us to respond to a manipulated environment that possesses a life of its own.
Lara Eggleton
Lara Eggleton is an independent writer and critic on the subjects of contemporary art and art history, currently based in the UK. She is a recipient of the Commonwealth and Overseas Research Scholarship and is undertaking a PhD in the History of Art at the University of Leeds. Lara also works part time as an Assistant Artistic Director for East Street Arts, based in Leeds.