... and on this manere a wrouhte

That title means ‘he carried out his plan’. We’ll explore where it’s from in the second September Substack of Our Longland Is Dreaming. This, though, is the first. You’ll have to wait.

Hello. Thank you for signing up to this experiment. For the next year Jim Sutherland and I (Thomas Sharp) are going to be working on a new artistic project. We have the title and the dirt-rough sketch of our subject matter – a unique and historical system of writing, the 14th century poem Piers Plowman, the 1381 Peasants’ Revolt, the idea of England, ploughed fields and land art.

But we don’t know what we’re actually going to make. Or how. Or where. Or with whom. This Substack is going to follow the progress of the project. Its research, tests and practical challenges.

---

Jim and I have previously collaborated on two other artistic works. In this Substack, I’m going to talk about those pieces as a way of foreshadowing the upcoming creative process.

Our first creation was the above – Twenty-five Sculptures in Five Dimensions in 2019.

We’d met briefly at the brilliant Birmingham Design Festival and I followed that beery episode up with an unsolicited email to Jim saying I had an idea. Later in the month we sat with tea in the National Theatre and I told him I had been creating sculptures.

That, although he knew me as a writer of adverts, I was in fact now a sculptor.

I had been for a couple of months. Constantly fascinated with consciousness – what it is, how to change it, whether it might be base reality – I’d had the Fluxusy idea that by describing a sculpture through writing, and a reader then reading those words and imagining the sculpture, in a very real sense (in the sense of nothing really being real) that sculpture had been formed from the raw material of consciousness.

And therefore it existed just as much as some glowering, marble Henry Moore amorphous figure.

And to make it interesting for myself, restrictions being interesting, I’d been sculpting each of these sculptures from 25 syllables. Here’s the first one I made and the first one I showed to Jim.

I’ll never leave you

A peony-blue
generic snowflake,
polished tin, the size
of the floor of the 
space you are now in. 

I told Jim I was in the process of sculpting 25 of these and wondered if there was some way we could turn them into an installation and if so, would he like to do that with me.

A month or so later we met in another cafe and Jim pulled out a maquette made in white card that he and his then colleague Rosey Trickett had created. The maquette was of a room with 25 plinths in it of five different sizes. I subsequently learned that Jim *really* likes making little models of rooms.

The design concept was elegant. On the top of each plinth were pads of paper printed with the sculptures, allowing visitors to the exhibition – held for one-night only in Covent Garden – to tear their favourites off and hold an exhibition of them in their own home.

Everything was in fives (the fifth dimension in the installation’s title being consciousness). Five type sizes, plinths laid out on a multiples-of-five grid, cocktails to drink with five ingredients and an ambient soundtrack created by film composer Alex Baranowski that was in five sections and using musical fifths.

Fittingly, the installation – which lasted a couple of hours – cost about five grand to put on.

People came and seemed to like it, though you can never really be sure with these things and what often follows is a melancholic sense of foolishness at spending money you don’t have on something no-one asked for.

---

So in 2021 we decided to do another one.

I came up with a language idea that I knew would appeal to Jim – a project based on chess. Jim likes chess. Jim likes chess more than you’d believe.

This time the concept came to me from a synthesis of three books I was reading at the time. A biography of the disturbed American chess genius Bobby Fischer, a book about the nefarious post-truth political theatre in Russia pioneered by Vladislav Surkov, and the text of the Bhagavad Gita. All books that, in their own way, dealt with illusion and reality.

My pitch to Jim was perhaps even vaguer than before. I said I wanted to do something with a poem of 41 alliterative verses, with each verse corresponding to a Bobby Fischer move in game six of the 1972 World Chess Championship between him and USSR’s Boris Spassky. It would be about post-truth culture.

Surprisingly Jim agreed. I think he might have stopped listening after the word ‘chess’.

And then we danced around the idea for *ages*. I wrote the piece but we had a long creative stalemate (not helped by Covid) of us not landing on a final form.

Partners are important. I’d done a piece of work for Park Village Studios and, instead of payment, asked them to give me one night’s use of their vast space for an event.

It was decided that Game Six would be this event.

Working with the brilliant Mario from Mata, as well as Rosey, we turned our 41 chess moves into a ten minute multi-screen bombardment of imagery, colour, sound and frantically building intensity.

We were lucky enough to have the Chess grandmaster, philosopher and Studio Sutherl& client Jonathan Rowson introduce the installation. Of the work he said ‘intensely perspectival, abounds with signifiers, but pertinent, with an underlying pulse of truth seeking and even a hint of transcendence.’

You can see the full piece as a single film below.

We also turned the Game Six text and visuals into a gorgeous limited-edition book with eight different covers to choose from. Each of those covers is a coloured chess collusion of two of the people in the text. My favourite is Coleridge and Melania.

We still have some copies of these and if you’d like a free one posted to you … just share something on your socials about Our Longland Is Dreaming with a link to this Substack and send me proof, along with your postal address.

---

Like Twenty-five Sculptures in Five Dimensions, Game Six was also a one-night only experience. Whenever I’ve talked about these projects I’ve always mentioned this tiny duration because it makes them seem excitingly limited-edition and of-the-moment.

Of course, they are *really* one-night only because they are so incredibly expensive to put on. Although Game Six’s venue was in-kind, it required the hiring of some huge high-grade projectors, vast vinyl designs for the floor, drinks galore and print of the book.

Both installations could only be put on by saving up money made from commercial work. Nevertheless both meant going into quite some debt.

I tell you this because it’s likely to be the same for Our Longland Is Dreaming, and actually I hope this penury tension will be one of the interesting elements about this Substack. Us talking about the realities of trying to create artistic work whilst far far outside any established artistic system.

Whatever we do here will not find a place in a gallery, there will be no press coverage, grants or artwork sales. We’re working in the tradition of the artistic amateur, rather than the professional, and perhaps this has its own story.

---

So here we are. Our Longland Is Dreaming is a third vague idea. I think we both know we want to make a piece of Land Art at the end of the year. I suspect we both want to learn how to plough a field. How any of this will happen and who we will work with … well, not sure.

Next Substack, I will talk about the rough idea and themes of this project. All comments welcome.