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Issue Number: 93
Richard Deacon RA photographed at Benares restaurant, London
Indian culture looms large in Richard Deacon’s visual imagination. His parents met and married in India during the War and when he was five, his father, an air force officer, was posted to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). ‘We sailed from Southampton, through the Suez Canal, from grey England in the Fifties to Ceylon, which was so exotic. I had the first experience I would describe as sculptural there, which was visiting a set of rock-carved Buddhas. One was standing, carved out from a cliff-face, and I was conscious that something had been taken away, so it was an experience of negative space. What wasn’t there was as important a part of what you were looking at as what was.’
Because of his Indian connection, and to coincide with the RA’s ‘Chola’ exhibition, we have chosen to have lunch at Benares, an upscale, modern Indian restaurant in Berkeley Square, a five-minute walk from the Academy. The restaurant’s chef points us to exquisite South Indian specialities: crispy soft shell crab with spicy squid and a passion fruit dressing; tandoor roasted monkfish with mushroom kedgeree and coriander-ginger sauce; seabass poached in saffron, coconut and tamarind, all complemented by an earthy three-lentil daal. The layers of delicate flavours make this Indian meal unlike any other either of us has tasted, and we pass the plates back and forth greedily to sample every dish.
‘I refused to go back to India for a long time because I had such wonderful memories and Ifelt afraid to lose them,’ he says. But, when he finally returned in 2004, the experience pushed him in a new direction. ‘I went to Bombay with a group of my students and visited two amazing temple sites: Ajanta and Ellora. While I was there I became interested in the idea of rock: Ellora has a massive Hindu temple, which is carved out from the inside of a single block. It’s an unbelievably perverse way to make a building, but it reignited my interest in carving. Some recent ceramics I’ve made started as carvings and hollowing out a lump of clay with modelling tools.’
India and his parents’ life there are on Deacon’s mind as he prepares for his upcoming exhibition, ‘Personals’, at the Ikon Gallery. When the artist was sorting through their house after his father died, he noticed piles of newspapers, which they had kept from all their postings around the world, either because they announced important news or had some personal meaning: ‘The more I looked through them, the more they felt like a work of art; there was that mixture of attachment and detachment, which is part of making art.’
The papers go back to the General Strike in 1926 and continue through the abdication of Edward VIII and Winston Churchill’s death to the Harrow train crash. ‘Since we moved all the time, the papers come from different places: an Indian newspaper announces partition in 1947. The Kennedy assassination comes from the United States. The papers feel like a history that I was part of but not necessarily involved in. I’m going to show the papers framed, so that you can only see the front page. Sometimes headlines are dramatic and sometimes you don’t know why the newspapers were kept – they form a found narrative of some sort.’
This small-scale, intimate work marks a departure for the artist, who is known for massive, bold, abstract constructions. Whether made in ceramic, metal or bent wood, his looping, folding forms express a modern baroque sensibility. They exude a caged energy, a constant tension between order and chaos, between his mastery of the materials and their dappled, dimpled surfaces. Deacon was originally drawn to sculpture as a teenager: ‘I liked to mess about with materials,’ he explains. ‘I’m interested in the mystery of materiality – in the work taking shape in front of me. The consequences of the work are not as interesting for me. Most of my pieces start with a feeling, a remembered sensation or something banal, which leads to stranger, more interesting places than trying to reflect on big issues.’
An unlikely but enduring inspiration is Poussin’s Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake in the Getty Museum, California (RA Magazine, Autumn 2006), where a man is killed in a corner of the foreground, setting off a chain reaction through the painting as people notice, or don’t, the tragedy in their midst. ‘I see this painting as about the relationship between the curved and the straight, the moving snake above this rigid dead body, life and death,’ he says. Poussin’s work is frequently described as frozen music, and perhaps the same metaphor can apply to the sinuous forms of Deacon’s sculptures. ‘In my own work, the idea of the curved and the straight is essential: for example, After in Tate Modern is a looping curve with a rigid steel barrier across it – it’s directly related to that image of the man with the snake on him.’
Deacon engages with the world in formal terms – whether he is looking at painting, making sculpture, or playing with the teacup on our table. He examines how something is made; he considers its matter. ‘I’m not a proselytiser for sculpture but people have been messing around with materials since the dawn of time. I want to pass that knowledge on.’ His belief in education is the chief reason he joined the RA. ‘The Schools are at the heart of the Academy,’ he says. ‘It is the one place where artists can have an impact on the future, outside of themselves. It’s vital to have an input on the next generation.’
Richard Deacon: Personals is at the Ikon Gallery, Birmingham (31 Jan–18 March); Benares Restaurant & Bar, 12a Berkeley Square House, Berkeley Square, London, W1 (020 7 629 8886)
