Tag Archives: tom burtonwood

Untitled (bridge to nowhere), pen on paper, 1996

This drawing taken from my sketchbook was the 2nd of a series of drawings, prints, paintings and eventually sculpture (installations) that i produced in my second semester of my second year at loughborough. for me this work has always been pivotal in my development as an artist. by the end of semester 1 of the 2nd year i think it’s fair to say i was flailing around. working from the landscape just wasn’t working out and i really really didn’t know what i was doing. the “skills” i was looking for weren’t really being taught and it was pretty much left up to you to figure out what it was you wanted to make and why. like i said i was pretty lost and losing my way with each turn.

at some point i made a sketch / lino cut of a bridge that led nowhere sitting atop a bunch of semi detached houses. at the time i think it was more about my personal sense of being confused but rightaway it became a great metaphor for a critique of culture / society / politics etc but done in a non-didactic, not preachy, ambiguous way.

Untitled (bridge to nowhere) detail, pen on paper, 1996

to my mind it goes something like this, the bridge represents a structure (or system) with a purpose. a bridge can cross a chasm, ford a river, link two sides, cultures etc. but a bridge and other structures like it require foundations, supports etc. the houses on the other represent people. so the bridge without foundations is held up by the people, and as such it’s as much a burden on them as it is a force for change or progress. and so i started making many images based on these ideas of structures and bridges and the like that serve a progressive agenda but can be used equally as oppressive mechanisms. like all good art students i was pretty sure i knew what was best for society in general and so to be fair these works were intended as a critique of the “normal” folk working their days jobs yadda yadda. at least to begin with anyway. so that the job is this oppresive activity that keeps us in our place and the bridge is this unattainable goal to strive for. but it turns out it goes to nowhere. pretty standard pseudo marxist student thinking. but at the time it was good for me to have a subject to work with and something i felt strongly aobut in the work once more.

Rendell St., Loughborough, Leicestershire.

This is the house is shared with Andy and Rob at the time. I think living down by the canal and near to the railway had a big influence on this “bridge” work. I was also reading Iain Banks stuff at the time, which is very dark and also quite critical of society, particularly his novel “The Bridge” where a car crash victim trapped in a coma imagines this whole city located on a bridge, the novel describes his struggles with trying to overcome the dream and return to reality. (clearly i borrowed a few ideas from Banks on this series.) I think later i was reading William Gibson who also used the bridge metahpor for 2 of his novels taking the Golden Gate bridge in SF as a post apocalyptic community. Anyhow Loughborough was always kind of post apocalyptic so it kinda fitted later on. Also around that time i went to Bangor in Wales and was impressed with the bridges out there.

After a while the bridge work became less and less about the critique element and more about making constructions and making formalist aesthetic decisions, which in turn led to the Studio Installation i posted here: http://tomburtonwood.com/2009/studio-installation-circa-1996/ this installation was my attempt to “get inside” the structures and create the all encompassing art experience, influenced fairly heavily by Arakawa and Madeline Gins and their concept of Reversible Destiny http://reversibledestiny.org/home.php….. anyhow so everything pretty much came full circle the bridge to nowhere became this literal bridge to new expression for me and opened my practice up to many new ways of thinking and working. sure enough i still lost the plot from time to time and have veered in many new directions since but these simple drawings were enough to devise a new trajectory for my practice which until then had been me working from life, drawing and trying to paint with little success and not really getting it!

the funny thing as i go thru all this old work and try to place it into context with each other and the new stuff is realizing the threads going thru all of it. systems, structures, representations of these things but also practical deployable infrastructure, ying and yang of adminstration, form and function.