Michael Brennand-Wood
Michael Brennand-Wood: Forever Changes
Ruthin Craft Centre, Denbighshire
22 September – 25 November 2012 then touring
Reviewed by Grant Gibson
The first exhibition to take up all three of Ruthin’s exhibition spaces, Forever Changes leaves the visitor with much to admire and a little to ponder. There’s no doubt that Michael Brennand-Wood is a singular man and a determined artist. It was while visiting Manchester Polytechnic as a schoolboy that he decided to study textiles rather than fine art. He was the only male on the course and as he explains: ‘Being in a minority makes you work hard; you’re trying to be creative and prove your worth at the same time.’
This retrospective provides a broad sweep of a career that began in the early 70s and includes work so fresh there wasn’t time to include it in the (beautifully illustrated) accompanying catalogue. You very much get the sense that Brennand-Wood has been an artist ahead of his time, but also one whose influences can be traced to a particular moment in pop culture. He’s a child of the 60s, whose work is imbued with the spirit of counter-culture and has the happy knack of gently subverting the prevailing consensus. During a period where architecture and design generally ignored pattern with Loos-ian fervour, it was the absolute focus of his work.
The show’s opening blurb makes reference to the music of Philip Glass and (influenced by John Cage) the use of chance. Much of the early work in textile and wood owes a debt to Glass’s repetitive rhythmic structures and illustrates his desire to work in the area between the silos of what was – and perhaps to a lesser degree still is – conventionally thought of as fine art and craft, proving that embroidery is just another artistic medium demanding the same level of critical attention as oil and canvas. ‘I also thought it was a drawing medium; the difference was I’d be working in 3D as opposed to 2D line,’ he explains.
As the work develops other themes emerge. The dark, brooding Sadie, for instance, uses the now familiar timber grid, collage and fabric but is directly influenced by the sinking of the Belgrano during the Falklands War. As protests go it’s hardly as eloquent as Shipbuilding, Elvis Costello’s seminal song about that same skirmish, but nevertheless hints at powerful work that was to follow two decades later.
Over the years the grids become less rigid, there are recurring dalliances with lace, native art and Cage – much of which is summed up in the 1997 work You Are Here – and by the turn of the millennium he enters a floral period. He’d had William Morris rammed down his throat as a student, and responded characteristically, or so it seems, by avoiding nature as an inspiration. However, after studying Central Asian suzani fabrics he took the plunge. Thankfully these pieces often have rather more to say than simply celebrating the natural world. 2004’s Crystallized Movements, for instance, is a comment on the Gulf War – recreating a flag, using embroidered flowers, with a base made from over 1,000 painted toy soldiers. The reference to the poppy fields of World War One aren’t hard to discern, although looking at the bright, almost psychedelic, colours Brennand-Wood employs, it’s hard not to be reminded of the famous image of a demonstrator placing a single flower in the barrel of a National Guardsman’s gun during the anti-Vietnam march on Washington in 1965.
The work turned out to be a precursor to a string of evocative protest pieces. 2007’s Holding Pattern investigates the connotations behind the word ‘arena’
– as a place of war and sport – by taking the plan of a well known (but unnamed) sports venue. Strewn around the periphery of the site are burned wooden figures awaiting burial, the architectural drawings at the centre reference the money made by nations during the slave trade. Along with the likes of 2011’s A Flag of Convenience and Lace: The Final Frontier, it gives the exhibition a visceral, emotive punch. This is no longer about proving textiles’ right to be taken seriously by a conservative, occasionally sneering art world but art that genuinely has something to say.
I’m not sure he always gets it quite right. ‘Work should, I believe, be reflective of the times within which it is made,’ he writes – in which case using deeply retro Space Invaders symbols in this year’s Restored and Remixed seems a curious decision. However, quibbles aside, this is a fascinating, sometimes surprising retrospective.
Grant Gibson is editor of Crafts magazine.
Michael Brennand-Wood: Forever Changes tours to Dovecot Studios, 10 Infirmary Street Edinburgh, Midlothian EH1 1LT 7 December 2012 – 12 January 2013, and then Burton Art Gallery & Museum, Kingsley Road, Bideford, EX39 2QQ, 9 March – 19 April 2013
