Paying Attention: The Sculpture of Victoria Rance

Charles Pickstone

Mama is a metal cage—or possibly a prison. She’s an empty cell, a three-foot void inside six-foot bars. On top of the bars, Mama wears an outrageous purple dome of five-petalled steel flowers welded together at their tips in irregular patterns. Mama looks pretty formidable [see Plate 1].

In the gallery, you wander around outside her steel rods looking for some breach in her well-defended personality, and there it is: Mama has a gap-toothed smile. You can enter her, walk inside her. The defenses were all on the outside: inside she is open, embracing, her starry hairpiece a lovable eccentricity.

Tree of Forgetting is the size and shape of a small, upturned bathtub. It is formed of die-stamped steel leaves roughly coated in brass, welded together in a coarse filigree; some leaves are missing [see Plate 2]. Whatever it is, it is dying, shedding its leaves. As you walk away, you cannot help but half-glimpse a hidden face even as it rots. An autumnal elegy, it has the poignant, almost tragic, quality of something on the edge of memory on the point of being lost for ever.

Kamara is made of small copper-coated disks, terracotta in color, welded together to create a six-foot hood [see Plate 4]. Across her open front hangs a veil of brass circles (curtain rings linked by split pins)—a travesty of a thousand bad Victorian paintings of oriental women and eastern allure. The eye knows perfectly well that there is nothing behind this metal fringe, this frond of rings constructed entirely of mass-produced industrial bits and pieces. And yet, as in all these works, the sculptor has contrived to give a sense of presence, of occupancy, to her hard-edged, blatantly unromantic raw materials. The mind cannot quite believe that there is no one there.

Victoria Rance, winner of the Mark Tanner Sculpture Award, is a metal sculptor working in a once derelict warehouse next to a creek where it runs into the Thames at Deptford in unfashionable southeast London. Deptford was once one of the world’s great commercial shipping ports: expeditions to the farthest parts of the British empire—South Africa, India, the New World—set off from here; not far away upriver are the steps where Queen Elizabeth I knighted Sir Francis Drake on his return from the first circumnavigation of the globe, while at Woolwich Arsenal, a little further downriver, major experiments in high-tech naval weaponry took place in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. But today there are few traces of that glorious past in the abandoned quayside that lies between hastily thrown-up apartment blocks and the empty shell of the Millennium Dome, floating on contaminated land.

Thanks to its commercial past, however, Deptford is a good area for a sculptor whose works are comprised of the raw materials of the building and engineering trades: welded metal bars and rods, mass-produced die-stamped decorative elements, chain and sheet steel. To the industrial archaeologist and naval historian, muddy Deptford Creekside is a paradise; Rance, too, contrives to create a paradise of the overlooked flotsam and jetsam of the commercial world, foregrounding objects that otherwise would simply lie, barely noticed, upon a steel stockholder’s racks or buried deep in reinforced concrete. Beneath the flame of her welding gear, bare metal responds delicately to her attentions. Across the creek from her studio, the huge hulk of an old wooden vessel sits slowly rotting into the mud, abandoned for a generation. A ceramic basin is visible on its deck, its only sign of life, which Rance has taken as the basis of her most recent work.

Steel has not enjoyed good press. It was snobbishly rejected by the Victorians, who were unable to enjoy the real aesthetic achievements of their century, the magnificent machines, engines, pumps, bridges, and ships of Brunel and his ilk. Even in more recent years, the outcry over Antony Gormley’s now iconic Angel of the North outside Newcastle in industrial northeastern England was largely related to the sculpture’s metal. But in the confines of Rance’s workshop in Deptford, even steel turns out to have an inner life—a shy and rather reticent soul.

Rance’s work is the perfect illustration of that basic courtesy which the French pre-war thinker Simone Weil regarded as being at the true heart of Christianity. Of the Good Samaritan’s response to the man who fell among thieves, Weil comments, “The actions that follow [the Samaritan’s noticing the victim] are just the automatic effect of this moment of attention. The attention is creative.” Weil refers to the robbers’ victim, before his rescue, as “only a little piece of flesh, naked, inert and bleeding beside a ditch...inert matter.” Extending Weil’s image, one might suggest that just as this human being was saved by the fundamental courtesy of the Samaritan’s paying him attention, noticing him, so inert matter is redeemed via the fundamental courtesy of the artist, any artist, who like the God of the Magnificat foregrounds the lowly and pays attention to that which would otherwise go unnoticed, unobserved, or unvalued, who shows that the humblest object can sing—even despised body fluids, in the eyes of a Helen Chadwick or an Andres Serrano.

Rance pays attention to her unromantic materials, to the inert matter of steel and mass-produced die-stamped pieces, in an entirely poetic manner. “The end of the poet is to arouse wonder; let him who cannot arouse wonder go work in the stables!” declared the seventeenth-century poet, Giambattista Marino. To find a wonder, a meraviglia, in quite such deeply unromantic materials is no mean achievement. Even Anish Kapoor, for example, in his famous Cloud Gate installed in Chicago’s Millennium Park, had to resort to highly polished and sexily reflective stainless steel.

Simone Weil continues her meditation on paying attention by suggesting that “To treat our neighbor who is in affliction with love is something like baptizing him.” Perhaps there is a sense in which a good artist baptizes her materials; by paying it due attention, the world is transformed. In this sense, Rance’s art is incarnational: out of the cold elements of mass-produced industrial culture she creates a sense of presence. She softens her hard materials with meaning.

Not that Rance allows the works or the viewer to escape into a mystical non-place or disembodied ether. There is no ghost in these machines. They rely on human beings to give them life—to dignify them with attention. In many of her pieces, a human spectator is required actively to engage with the work to bring it to life. One must enter it, put it on, or operate it. For example, Dream is a pair of wings attached to the wall on semi-circles [see Plate 5]. One can stand on the small tree stump provided at their base and operate them—but it is heavy work. One may dream of flying effortlessly, but Rance’s wings are difficult to operate. They make you realize that flying, the carefree stuff of dreams, is hard work for birds, a reminder of the material nature of flying. Wheel requires you laboriously to spin a large welded wheel. Moving these objects is not easy: it is hard work, being embodied, as we daily wade through the 14.2 pounds per square inch of atmosphere on the earth’s surface. There is no escape here into the idealist effortlessness of sublimation that delivers us into the ghostly, disembodied paradise of adolescent fantasy. Even dreaming requires a body and night sweats.

Rance’s very English version of Arte Povera, the Italian sculpture movement of the sixties and seventies, reveals the enigmatic and playful transformative potential of impoverished materials—but without the often baroque, quasi-mystical (despite their claims), apparatus of her Italian predecessors. No magic: simply being human and paying attention and being surprised by what is already there.

The work of transforming the world—perhaps even baptizing it—as Simone Weil reminds us, always involves renunciation: “To desire the existence of the other is to transport oneself into them by sympathy and as a result to have a share in the state of inert matter which is theirs.” In a work such as Holy Fool, which requires the viewer to stand on a plinth situated directly underneath a metal halo nailed to the gallery wall, one is reminded of the great sixth-century Passiontide hymn by Venantius Fortunatus “Pange Lingua,” in which the poet imagines Jesus hanging on the cross and begs the cross to soften up:

Bend thy boughs, O Tree of Glory,
Thy too rigid sinews bend;
For awhile the ancient rigor
That thy birth bestowed, suspend,
And the King of heavenly beauty
On thy bosom gently tend.

This bizarre, anthropomorphic apostrophe to the rigid cross dramatically underlines the stubbornness of the human beings crucifying Jesus who do have the power to soften up—and inevitably reminds the Christian of Mary, who did gently tend Jesus on her bosom. Victoria Rance is a sculptor who has taken Fortunatus’s prayer seriously—her materials are, however, not so much wood as iron, zinc, and reinforcing steel. Perhaps she bends the rigid sinews of her metals to uncover the rigid cruelty of human intransigence.

There is a certain reticence, an embarrassment even, about her work—as if it is slightly ashamed that such lumpen materials could create space to elicit a sensitive response from the viewer, maybe a fear that it might end up looking ridiculous, like a dancing elephant. But it is we, the viewers, who are bewitched into thinking that rusty iron or steel or zinc is dumb, unsubtle, and ordinary. In the hands of an artist, the spell is broken and we can see it—and ourselves too—as part of God’s creation.

Rance’s work is undeniably liturgical. She has received several commissions from churches, for example, a corona reminiscent both of lily and chalice that hangs over the central altar at the chapel at RAF Halton—a piece that focuses the action of the Holy Spirit, a sort of sculptural epiclesis. But more often hers is a secular liturgy, a hallowing of the repetition of industrial labor. Simone Weil again: “workers need poetry more than bread; they need that their life should be a poem. They need some light from eternity.” Rance tries to see the poetry, the light from eternity, in their work. Weil writes, “Religion alone can be the source of such poetry.... To strive for necessity and not for some good—driven not drawn—in order to maintain our existence just as it is—that is always slavery.” Rance’s poetry redeems even the most repetitive factory work, even if she herself is less confident about the explicit place of religion than Weil.

Another aspect of Rance’s art, not mentioned so far, is visible in a series of exquisite smaller pieces made from organic materials. Wasp Bath is a small bath shape comprising about sixty small wax cells melted together. In the center of each is embalmed a dead wasp, caught by her children on holiday in France [see Plate 3]. Flower Bath similarly embalms petals of flowers. These smaller, more delicate works are the reverse of her metal sculpture: if the latter are about discovering the presence of the personal within the brute, these pieces are about the impersonal aspects of the organic. Perishable materials—beeswax, petals, dead wasps—are built up into formal structures. And here, inevitably, that unconscious streak of cruelty one has sensed all through her work becomes explicit, with wasps or flowers incarcerated in their organic cells (the former inevitably redolent of Iain Banks’s remarkable cult novel, The Wasp Factory). Another layer of complexity emerges from these apparently straightforward works. The cruelty of nature is harder than the stubbornness of steel.

Most of the works mentioned so far were exhibited at a solo exhibition last year at the Standpoint Gallery in East London, just around the corner from Hoxton Square and the fashionable White Cube Gallery, home to the Damien Hirst generation of young British artists. Rance’s most recent exhibition, Fe2O5 was held this year at the Myles Meehan Gallery in Darlington in the industrial northeast, another region evocative of Britain’s manufacturing past. For this exhibition of work by five women metal sculptors, Rance created a new piece, Attic, a six-foot steel frame to which fifteen rows of identical decorative steel leaves had been riveted in an unyielding grid, which was sprayed with zinc and then copper to give a terracotta-like finish [see Plate 6].

The work was inspired by childhood memories of a secret attic den. While for many children the instinct to create a special and secret lair in woods or shrubbery or attic leads to cherished memories of a dark and protected safe place, Rance has abstracted her memories to the point where even the nature-hating Mondrian could hardly have complained. If anything, one feels rather sorry for these identical zinc and copper-coated leaves, sorted and hung out to dry like specimens in an inorganic and inflexible pattern, leaning against the white wall of the gallery like an abandoned bedstead. Yet the absent presence we have come to expect in Rance’s work is certainly manifest. It has to do with a lost childhood, some land of lost content just glimpsable through these artificial leaves riveted into place. Behind the cruelty perhaps there is anger too, latent in the absence of any of the organic content leaves should evoke. Rance’s own childhood in the country was, apparently, an unusually free-ranging one. These 158 leaves are both a tribute and a lament, simultaneously evocative and repressive.

Attic contrasts entirely with another, earlier work in the same exhibition, Cage (2001), in which Rance has allowed herself, for once, to be seduced by the tactile surface of her material. Cage is a splendidly romantic piece, four cast iron round arches, 13 inches high, welded together to enclose a protected space; the gnarled surfaces of the metal and its warm texture and color, along with the shape of the arches, reminiscent of Romanesque architecture or cathedral windows, make the work rich in narrative possibilities. This piece rather than Attic is the true fairytale, the safe enclosure that permits the mind of the child to travel to the stars. Its accessibility allows the adult viewer to appreciate the toughness of Rance’s more abstract work, which succeeds in achieving a similar alchemy while using much less promising raw material.

Rance’s most recent piece, Sink, neatly encapsulates the visual and semantic complexity inherent in all her work. Originally inspired by the ceramic basin visible aboard the rotting and inaccessible hulk outside her studio, it is a bowl-shaped form constructed of cast-iron flowers shaped roughly like small daffodils, their trumpets welded together to form a loose web partially covered in rough copper, some of which has been allowed to oxidize [see front cover]. Once again, industrial shards of organic inspiration are manufactured into an evocative shape. Outside, the rough surface looks like the bottom half of an egg carton, extruded and armored. Inside, the hollow, copper-coated flowers offer an evocative honeycomb of open cells.

Rance suggests that she intends this piece as a sort of holy water stoup such as might be found at the entrance to a church, generally filled with blessed water to remind believers of the baptism by virtue of which they became members of the church. But, incapable of holding actual water, the piece condenses the sense of presence which it is Rance’s particular talent to evoke into almost visible form—a sort of alembic of infinity. A work like this acts like a valley of dry bones and almost compels the viewer to clothe it with flesh. Whether this “flesh” is actually narrative shape, psychological analysis, historical association, structural interpretation, or material resonance—all of which are perfectly possible—Rance provides us with the phonemes of a visual language, the minimal visual signifiers that the viewer needs, once drawn into these works, to participate in a language that speaks of the richness, complexity and depth of life itself. The works’ courtesy and humility make them the screen onto which the viewer is invited to project meanings or in which viewers may detect meaning, and in so doing either reveal something of their deepest selves or catch the echo of the rhythm of life’s calling to itself.

Whether our response is seen as subjective or objective probably depends, finally, upon the sensibility of the viewer. But perhaps, as in much of the best art of today, the distinction between the two, necessary at a certain stage in the development of the human mind, is shown to be artificial. We are all, no matter what our backgrounds, speakers of a language that we have learned and that is not our own, and which molds us in the image of the community that largely regulates its use even if we have the freedom to negotiate individual meanings; we are all expressions of life’s yearning, even if we have some room to maneuver along the way. Perhaps Rance’s more monumental work, along with that of many of her contemporaries, acts like a domestic version of Stonehenge, as a listening chamber, a quiet space, in which to pick up the hum of the universe, of life itself, in our individual acts of freedom.

Where does the richness of vision found in these works come from? For Ezekiel, it was easy: it was the spirit, God’s ruah, that clothed the dry bones with flesh and sinew. Even in secular language, the notion of spirit has a long and venerable history. For example, the influential British expressionist artist David Bomberg was able to talk about “the spirit in the mass” in his lectures as late as the 1950s. But today the word spirit has so many dualistic, otherworldly associations that it is difficult to use it in the context of an artist like Rance whose speciality is precisely to illuminate the this-worldliness of the world in such a way that we see it to be no prison, no shadow of some other and greater Platonic reality of Truth, Beauty and Goodness, but as God-bearing in itself. Although Rance’s better works are certainly, in R.S. Thomas’s words, laboratories of the spirit, they are better described as places of encounter with the complexity of life—whether a subjective complexity we project onto them or an objective complexity which embraces us, one cannot tell—than channels of escape to some Otherworld. Simone Weil reminds us that, as followers of a religion founded on an incarnate God, we cannot ask for better. “Through manual labor...human beings turn themselves into matter, as Christ does through the Eucharist.”

In conclusion, these highly sensate dreamcatchers manifest a contemporary sacramentality. Traditionally, the sacraments, if carried out with due regard for the prescribed rituals, guaranteed God’s presence among his faithful people—and concomitantly excluded all those on the outside of the game. Exclusion has always been a necessary part of the religious mindset. But on a shrinking and globalizing planet, for those not content to raise the shutters of the mind ever higher against the lights and noises of the world outside, works such as these uncover the locus of the divine in the extraordinary network of meanings and connections that spring out of nowhere the moment that correct and courteous attention is paid to any aspect of creation. Such a sacramentality is inevitably inclusive, and appropriate to a joined-up world of many religions, spiritualities, faiths, and beliefs. This is not to say that no belief or faith, however bizarre, is beyond criticism; simply, that in paying attention to ordinary things, there is the beginning of a language that makes sense to all.

To give the last word to Simone Weil: “Art is an attempt to transport into a limited quantity of matter, modeled by human beings, an image of the infinite beauty of the entire universe. If the attempt succeeds, this portion of matter should not hide the universe, but on the contrary it should reveal its reality to all around.”

Good artists, then, are the theologians who teach us the language of courtesy that is a prerequisite for appreciating the infinitely complex, delicate and subtle filigree of meanings and relationships that is the reality of the universe.

Issue #48 • Winter 2006