This 30 minute documentary delves into the life and creative processes of Richard James, a visionary assemblage artist renowned for transforming found materials from the natural world into profound works of art. Our film explores James' unique artistic journey, revealing how the recurring themes of astronomy, religion, natural history, and biology intertwine to influence his distinctive work. www.goldmarkart.com/
We follow Richard to the Outer Hebrides where, guiding us through the stunning landscape, he talks us through the process of collecting and curating found materials. In a moving interview he discusses his profound relationship to the natural world and his desire to honour and show respect to the flora and fauna that we so often take for granted.
We then travel back to his Northamptonshire studio where he selects, combines and transforms these materials into art. Through time-lapse sequences showing the creation of a piece from start to finish, we witness some of the incredible technical processes that he uses to make his constructions, many of which take over three months to complete.
We visit a major exhibition of his work at Goldmark Gallery and James talks about the pleasure it gives him when people connect with his work.
Our film attempts to open the door to an understanding of Richard James' complex and beautiful assemblage art, celebrate his contributions to contemporary art and inspire viewers to see the beauty and interconnectedness of the natural world through his eyes.
Goldmark Films is the Pro Moviemaker Filmmaker of the Year and four-times Royal Television Society Award nominated independent film making arm of the world-renowned Goldmark Gallery. It has been producing broadcast arts documentaries for over 20 years and has made 24 feature length documentaries and 100 plus shorts. Goldmark's global reputation allows it to gain intimate and revealing interviews with some of the world's leading artists, ceramicists, writers and critics. Its films on contemporary artists are complemented by a stable of programmes unveiling the fascinating life stories of both the famous and the forgotten painters, potters and sculptors of the 20th century.
A family business, Goldmark have been selling art from our Gallery in Uppingham, UK for more than 50 years and hold over 50,000 items in stock. Explore a wide range of art, ceramics, sculpture, books, and DVDs all available to you through our website www.goldmarkart.com
Catalogue Essay | 'Richard James: Assemblage Art' by Robert Macfarlane
I first encountered the work of Richard James six autumns ago, at a period of my life when I was travelling frequently to the Outer Hebrides and the north-western seaboard of mainland Scotland. That year I sailed overnight in an old open boat from the Butt of Lewis up to Sula Sgeir - the Gannet Rock - forty miles out into the North Atlantic. My skipper on that journey, Ian Stephen, was a navigator of exquisite precision. To plot our course on the charts he used a pair of brass dividers with curved handles, that reminded me of the skull of a godwit. The sky on the night we sailed was cloudless. Jupiter blazed in the east. A phosphorescent wake unfurled behind us. As our destination lay due north, our navigation was celestial and simple: keep the North Star steady between halyard and spar.
Seeing Richard’s exquisite work for the first time shortly after that journey, then, I was struck both by its eeriness and its familiarity. The obsessive nature of his collecting and arranging; his fascination with star-charts, with birds and whales, with littorals, with wrack and wreck, with navigation and orientation - these made immediate sense to me. I admired, too, the assembly of precedents that his cabinets invoked: the reliquary (sacred), the wunderkammer (secular), the 19th-century naturalist’s cabinet, the archaeologist’s display, all shaded by a kind of steam-punk fetish.
What I could not pin down - and what gave the work its askance power in addition to its delicate beauty - was the nature of its address. Towards whom were these works tilted, I wondered? From where had they come? They seemed the ritual objects of another civilization or epoch altogether, somehow washed up - stranded - in the present day. I puzzled vainly at their workings, as one might at an orrery or astrolabe. Their quasi-mechanical structures invited causal thinking, even as their occult textures undid such logic. What does the alignment of this bone-shard with that phial achieve? What ritual task is undertaken by the conjoinment with horse-hair of this shell with that beak?
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23 июн 2024
