Tom Burtonwood

Mobile Sculpture, sketchbook page, 2000

At some point it occurred to me that you could “park” / install / display / deploy a mobile sculpture at Walmart or some other retail store parking lot fairly easily. You have a captive, if likely bemused / uninterested, audience and some super absurd awesomeness. Never did follow thru on this 100%. the mobile lander/ sculpture “Action” documented here comes close but we didn’t really leave it in one place and wait for a reaction… hopefully I will get the chance to make amends on this fairly soon.

Sketchbook, wheeled concertina sculpture, 2000

Sketchbook, wheeled concertina sculpture, 2000

Post it Note sketch, 2000

Posting has been slow of late as i prepare for the start of the school semester, i’m teaching courses at SAIC and UIC in the fall and with the new term only days away at UIC i’m putting the finishing touches to the syllabus and what not. It’s great to be teaching again, i’m looking forward to meeting my students and immersing myself in academic life. I’m hoping to take some classes myself either in Motion Graphics or Maya both of which would be a big help to the studio effort. Holly is also about to start school at SAIC for her MFA in sculpture so we’re about to become a very academic household again.

Post It Notes, 2000

In a search for the sewing machine Holly dug out some sketchbooks from a “hidden” closet last night, and found some real treasures. I’ll be trying to get back in the daily posting groove and share these with everyone. Looking at this current post and the last one i;m struck as usual by the similarities and connections between the work i was making in the period of 1995 – 1997 and 2000 – 2001. The synchronicity of seeing all this work, from Loughborough, Carbondale and now Chicago together for the first time combined with my “new” studio practice is very exciting and I hope that i can get some of these “unfinished ideas” out in the real world soon. As you can see from the drawings these images mostly revolve around the idea of unfolding sculpture, of an installation that is either MANPORT (man portable) or VEH PORT MOD (vehicle portable modules) …. At the time i was making this work, i was back in the UK i think for the summer before my final year in C’dale. Regular air travel meant that i had to carry whatever i took back and forth across the Atlantic. After transporting an aluminum relief across the water in the summer 0f 1999 i realized that i should quit making art out of solid metals like aluminum or iron and focus instead on more MAN PORT objects / items. This idea for making in a general sense has held true for me throughout my practice, working with Holly or by myself. Apart from a brief stint between 2004 – 2005 (ish) i’ve never owned a car or other form of motorized transport and frankly do not plan to. Holly and I factor our living plans around public transport. When we do a big install we rent a cargo van or similar. And so it goes for my art practice, these sketches illustrate ideas for either unfolding installations that expand from a compact module to fill an exhibition hall, to paraphrase Marshall Mcluhan, “the medium is the message”…. the work is about networks, structures—- and it speaks this with form — it is what it is — OR the sketches illustrate pieces that are still modular, but are wheeled and can be moved from place to place and exhibited not necessarily in an exhibition hall but rather taken out into the public sphere.

Post It Notes

Studio wise i’ve been building and calibrating a camera stand to record all the frames of the Permutations animation i drew while in France this summer. It’s taken a lot of effort and fine tuning, and in the long run maybe it would have been quicker just to scan these images in at a low ppi… but i have another experiment / idea to follow up on now…. which if it’s half way interesting will post asap….

Anyhow plenty good material here to work from…. ok now i’m off downstairs to draw.

Permutations (unfolding pyramid), pen and colored pencil on overlay paper, 2001

This is a pseudo-isometric drawing from 2001 showing a pyramid form emerging from a cube. this piece went on to be developed as a 2 foot square sculpture in card board that has been lost . I plan to remake the sculpture asap. It was a complicated piece with a lot of math to get the angles right but i loved it because of how something so complex could “transform” into a simple cube. each section unfolded to reveal the pyramid. for me i was interested in the idea the that something could unravel infinitely to base materials and still reassemble itself to an original memory driven form.

this piece was drawn on “disney” overlay paper purchased at MGM studios back in the late 80’s. you can see the cut outs at the bottom of the page to attach to a light table. there is also a little disney icon that unfortunately did not fit on the scanner bed, i will photos separately.

p.s. posting has been light of late. first we were on vacation, then we had to get caught up post vacation. now i realize that getting caught up is perhaps a misnomer but i do need to get back on the wagon as there’s a lot more stuff to upload. part of the problem is that i’ve started “making” things again, as the animations that have gone up attest to, but they are but one facet of a four ring circus, i’m also working on drawing again, which really is a first for me in the last decade, and i’m working on some new wooden constructions. the fourth ring is WHAT IT IS, our project space, we have an opening next week featuring Andrew Rigsby’s video work so there’s that all to do too!!!

but i’m also concerned about both the look / feel of the site which i need ot stamp with my creative persepctive and the organization of the site and this archive which is admittedly a little scatter shot a little to random but i’m stil lnot really clear if i want to post thing chronologially as that’s too mcuh of a calendar, so i need ot come up with a way of slotting the disparate posts into sections that work. !!!

wow. i found this photo today. and i’m totally thrilled about this work again! i gotta get in the studio for sure. sad thing is i don’t have ANY  of this work anymore. it either got trashed or gven away. i f anyone has any of these pieces please let me know they went to a good home! totally crazy.

…work in progress, 2001 (installation with David Lohman and David Constable / with Jason Pritchett on the audio component… link>  Institutional Critique )

This photograph documents that chaos created when 3 artists collaborate on a site specific installation deep within the “corridors of power.” Revisiting the scene of a prior installation Burtonwood and Lohman brought Constable along to wreak sonic havoc once more on the Allyn Building admin corridor SIUC school of art. in this outing the contents of the still life closet was emptied out into the hall way and a tannoy installed with a looping glitchy gnarly sequence of sounds pounding out.

Studio, Carbondale, 2000

In keeping with the diagonal slant of the previous post i present this snap shot of my studio, circa 2000, at the Glove Factory, Carbondale. One of my abiding interests are systems and the information they require to exist andthe data the produce. Part of this fascination includes being overwhelmed by information, whether undertaking research for a specific art work and not knowing where to draw the line, or attempting to define a complex system, or some other instance of massive overload, in any case there is way more data out there than we can hope to understand or parse together or see the linkages and discern the differences. One response to this phenomena for me has always been to drop the filters and just present it, warts and all, un-mediated as much as possible. i think on one level i enjoy the aesthetic of overload, of sensory over stimulation  and on the other hand in the presence of so much random material i try and still develop relationships and linkages. The image above is taken from my studio in Carbondale toward the end of my 2nd yerar there. having re-newed my attraction to all things reflective i started pasting up on the studio walls pretty uch any thing and everything that seemed half way interesting without much thought as to how it would look or what it might be later on.

Fuck Committees, Tibor Kalman.

Tibor Kalman was a big influence on my thesis show work in Carbondale. This text is from “Tibor Kalman, Perverse Optimist” edited by Peter Hall and Michael Bierut, pub. Princeton Architectural Press (September 1, 2000). Upon reading this text i knoew i had to convene my own committees to decide on my projects for me.

Lander, Cardboard and mixed media, 2000

Lander was the next generation of mobile sculptures i produced at SIUC. The Lander was a in military speak a MANP (Man Portable) sculpture. Drawing inspiration from the Apollo Eagle Lunar Lander the piece folded into a compact rectangle that could be carried as a backpack. A standard camera tripod provided legs to raise the Lander off the ground. The sections were intended to resemble solar panels or some kind of sensor array. Once again i painted it a bright yellow for maximum disruption when set up in public.

Apart from creating some kind of absurd intervention, this piece was the first system sculpture. Traveling first from Carbondale via Amtrak to Chicago, then by air from Chicago to Minneapolis (via Kansas City) and back again this piece was an early stab at developing an administrative art work. Lander was a super important work for me as it focused in on a range of themes and practices that would shape my development both at Carbondale and later here in Chicago.

First and foremost it got the work out there. In a real physical sense. Not only was the work shipped around the Midwest but at each location it was installed on the street for 10 – 15 minutes and passed out information to passersby. Each intervention was documented with photographs and later in the gallery these images were combined with maps showing each site. Apart from the simple act of getting visibility this project cemented the DIY ethos that would define pretty much everything i have done since as an artist and arts professional. In a wider sense this piece symbolized the transportation of ideas, creating networks, developing “integrated systems.” All concepts that again would prove key to my thesis show and later to my practice. And oddly enough for me this piece was pre-internet, sure i was using email, and thinking about web sites and so forth but it was still dot com bubble land, ie it wasn’t utterly ubitquitous. For me this piece was about tracking an object of intellectual curiousity through physcial space, as one might track a package via fed ex.

UPDATE 08/29/09

APS Filmstrip showing different installations in MPLS, 2000

Digging thru boxes tidying the studio and found this image, of showing various installations of Lander in and around Uptown in Minneapolis during the Thanksgiving break in the fall of 2000. I love the format of this APS filmstrip, a sort of pre-digital image, or at least a transitional technology that if anything was a signal of the eventual demise of 35mm (135) camera film. Anyhow i love how this image shows all the different states, with a numerical designation in the bottom left corner and so forth. At some point i’ll upload further documentation of the project and possibly build a small sub-website to tell the story completely.

This is one of my first experiments with mobile sculpture / art that can be deployed easily (in public, or elsewhere). This piece was constructed using cardboard boxes hoarded from the local liquor store, embedded around a garment rack and painted bright yellow. the intention at best was to create something utterly jarring to the every day, something completely absurd and drag it around the strip in carbondale for a photo opportunity. i guess i wasn’t really concerned with getting reaction / feedback from the public, as we did the “deployment” early one morning when the sky was blue but everyone else was still sleeping. gorilla suit assistance from David Lohman who helped in many significant and diverse ways thru carbondale experience 1998 – 2001 and onwards.

looking back and forwards i think the intention behind this piece is just fine, and again like a lot of my carbondale era work there’s a lot of humor in it, the materials- recyced cardboard and glue, are still staples of my diet here in chicago, so i can see more of these sculptures on the horizon, i’d like to cut the garment rack out and just make these lumpy balls, make maybe 10-15 different sizes, different colors and roll them around my neighborhood, i think that would be a lot of fun…..