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Biggs and Collings are interested in something they have noticed by looking at art from the past. Art, as it used to be understood, has come to an end. But what strikes them is that old ideas and habits of mind are hard to shake off. Former ways of thinking constantly influence behaviour today. You could say that an example of this phenomenon is the way the aestheticisation of the art object has been replaced by the aestheticisation of the art experience. The thorny issue of how the past is present in what we, as a society, see and do, and the way in which it may differ from what we believe we say and do, is at the heart of Biggs’ and Collings’ work.
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A preoccupation with past and present comes from the work they do when they are not painting together. Outside their collaboration, Biggs is a mosaicist and Collings is a broadcaster and writer. An example of Biggs’ work is the Made in England project, a mosaic made with the people of Stoke-on-Trent. It demonstrates this whole issue of cultural legacy. In Made in England, she takes backstamps — the marks on the backs of plates, cups and saucers, ranging from the 18th century to the present day — cuts them out and reassembles them into a mosaic that is both intricate and large scale (detail right, top). |
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The formal arrangement relates to the circular nature of tableware, but the content expresses changing cultural beliefs. Each individual backstamp is a bearer of history. A dinner service named ‘Colonial Village’ for example, has a certain backstamp (right, below). The assumptions behind ‘Colonial Village’ contrast vividly with those underlying Jamie Oliver’s recent range of tableware for Royal Worcester including ‘Big Dog Bowl’, or the sixties range designed by John Russell ‘Black Velvet’ made for the company Hostess Tableware. Even the company’s name gives a clue to cultural assumptions. These backstamps — more or less designed in order to remain unseen — are rich with transforming ideologies within the formal constant of the sign or trademark. The mosaic finds a means to convey the way beliefs change over time. |
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In his writing work, Collings too is a time-traveller. His use of history to pinpoint present belief systems is playfully summed up in the interviews he conducts with historical figures as varied as Jesus, Constantine and Michelangelo. (See History of Art from the Year Dot). As with the general drift of his TV programmes and books, the interviews are about challenging people’s amnesiac belief that how they currently think is how everyone has always thought.
To return to the paintings, in order to highlight the way these historical perspectives inform their visual aims, the titles they gave their works from the 2008 show at FAS English Primitive came from buildings and places in Stoke-on-Trent. The reason for this was to draw attention to another aspect of their consciousness of these issues of past and present — the aspect of education.
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The ceramic industry had a formative, but little known influence on art education. At one time there were more art schools in Stoke than in any city in the UK. City and Guilds, an art school where Biggs and Collings teach, owes its existence to the pottery manufacturer, Henry Doulton (right). Royal Doulton is now defunct but was formerly based in both Lambeth and Stoke-on-Trent. At the moment, the division between a practical application of creative skills and a contemporary art that is considered to be more philosophical in nature is currently up for question in art schools. This is one of the issues Biggs and Collings raise in their teaching and in their art-work. |
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Henry Doulton toby jug |
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Five Sisters — their show at York St Mary’s — is an installation made up of mosaic and paintings. This is the first time Biggs and Collings have brought the two together for a show. The mosaic, which is made from 13th and 14th century pottery shards from the collection of York Museum Trust is called ‘Clay End’. The paintings have the collective title Paintress. There is still a strong division of labour in what remains of the ceramic industry. Men are sculptors and work at the ‘clay end’, and women work in the decorators department. The women who paint the ware are known as ‘paintresses’. (The division of labour also operates in the creation of Biggs and Collings’ oil paintings, in this case the other way round to the old paintress system — Biggs conceives the organisation of colours and Collings executes the paintings.) |
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So, social relations, labour, economics and history play a part in the work of Biggs and Collings, but in the end abstract art has to be taken seriously on its own terms. Biggs and Collings choose an abstract form for their work — they think art doesn’t have to be literal. They choose this modernist mode, abstraction, because they believe that, historically, modernism was the last moment when art wasn’t about negation or futility. They respond to the optimism of the abstract tradition. Their ideas of history are fundamentally positive; they think it’s possible to effect social change, and they don’t believe everything is futile. The work is not a picture of modernism, or a pastiche of it, it is an exploration of local relationships with the aim of creating a synthesis of differences. In formal terms their paintings are about muted colour contrasted with vibrant colour — dark versus light at some points, elsewhere a tonal similarity. Plus it’s all done with a painterly application, so there is a constant play within the geometric divisions of broken, slightly scrubby surfaces contrasted with flatter ones. |
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The tonal juxtapositions mean that there is a rather 3D illusionist aspect to the paintings, but this effect is a by-product of other experiments, it’s not a starting point.
The interest in experimenting with tonal contrast comes from looking at figurative art and has a relationship to the body, because of the way the eye recognises form from tone.
People understand what they see by registering changes in tone.
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Giorgio Morandi Still life 1946 |
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Effects of light on form, seen in a photo of waste cups
from manufacturer Roy Kirkham, Stoke-on-Trent |
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Biggs and Collings start with local colour relationships (what one colour triangle does to the next one) and adjust these in relation to the way the whole thing looks. (Biggs creates a small set of a few colour samples, patches of oil paint on a test sheet of canvas, and Collings starts applying these to the painting — which up to this point has just been a pencilled grid of triangles in rectangles.) Local relationships can throw up impossible contrasts, the painting can seem to tip sideways, or shout too loudly in some areas. They adjust and adjust (whilst trying to retain the original decisions as much as possible.) Then they see the painting through to its conclusion: an overall visual logic. They don't care about triangles as such of course. They're looking for metaphors for effects of light. And like everything else light too has a historical context. Here’s a picture from the past that shows that light too, isn’t universal, but is culturally specific. |
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An experiment on a bird in an air pump 1768, Joseph Wright of Derby |
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