John Gerrard: Leaf Work
A collaboration with the 23rd Biennale of Sydney, Australia
Phileas, Opernring 17, Vienna
22 March - 9 June 2023
John Gerrard, Leaf Work, 2020. Installation view at the 23rd Biennale of Sydney, 2022. Photo: Courtesy of the artist and Pace Gallery
John Gerrard, Leaf Work, 2020. Installation view at Phileas – The Austrian Office for Contemporary Art, 2023. Photo: kunst.dokumentation.com / Manuel Carreon Lopez
Our first exhibition in 2023 presented a single, monumental work by the Austrian-based Irish artist John Gerrard. Following a series of studio visits by curator José Roca in March 2021, Gerrard was invited to participate in the 23rd Biennale of Sydney. His digital simulation Leaf Work was installed in a public park at Bangaroo Reserve, high above the Sydney Harbour Bridge, with the support of funding provided by Phileas and the Austrian Federal Ministry.
The work depicts a lone female figure, draped in green leaves, moving slowly across an empty landscape. As day turns to night, and the seasons change, the figure continues her mournful walk with bowed head and shoulders slumped. Conceived as a lament to the climate crisis, Leaf Work was originally commissioned by Galway International Arts Festival for Galway 2020, European Capital of Culture.
The work was presented in Vienna on a large-scale LED wall, allowing visitors to accompany the work's unfolding over a 24-hour cycle throughout the day and night. It was Gerrard's first solo exhibition in Austria since 2007, and was accompanied by a programme of public events.
John Gerrard (born 1974 in Tipperary, Ireland, with a production studio in Vienna) is an internationally acclaimed artist and pioneer of digital simulation. Creating virtual worlds, his works are constructed using real-time computer graphics, a technology developed by the military and now used extensively in the gaming industry. He has had solo exhibitions at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh; Lincoln Center, New York, in association with the Public Art Fund; Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art, Beijing; Somerset House, London; Kunsthalle Darmstadt; and Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among others. Phileas has previously co-produced projects by Gerrard for Manifesta 12, Palermo, and the 13th Gwangju Biennale, South Korea.
Opening hours at Opernring 17, Vienna
Tuesday - Friday 11am - 5pm
Saturday 11am - 3pm
& by appointment
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Jasper Sharp: Let's begin by talking about the character in this particular work, the leaf-covered figure. Who is she and where does she come from?
John Gerrard: The 'green man' - or green woman in this case - belongs to an ancient pan-European folk tradition dating back to Greek and Byzantine times. I first came across mentions of the character in books more than twenty years ago, and remember dressing up my sister Esther in a costume made of beech leaves. All of a sudden, she was someone else, a completely unfamiliar character. It had an immediate potency.
JS: But it was quite some time before it found its way into your work.
JG: The idea sat with me quietly for a long time. In 2018 I received an invitation from the Galway International Arts Festival to conceive a project as part of their European Capital City of Culture proposal, and it felt like an ideal opportunity to bring the leaf-covered figure to life. They agreed to commission the piece, and I got to work. From the very beginning I wanted her to be female, a sort of mother figure, but also symbolic of a non-human world.
JS: What can you tell me about the landscape in which the work unfolds?
JG: It is a remarkable site in Connemara, in the far west of Ireland, that bore witness to two of the most transformative episodes in 20th century history. It was from here in 1907 that Marconi broadcast the first radio transmission across the Atlantic, an incredible accelerating force for human endeavour, and communication and trade in particular. And twelve years later in 1919, the very same spot was the landing site for the first non-stop flight across the Atlantic by the pilots John Alcock and Arthur Whitten.
JS: That's extraordinary. Once the site had been chosen, you began the meticulous process of mapping the landscape through film and photography. How does this work exactly?
JS: The first layer is a satellite survey to scan the topography of the site from a height of around 10 kilometers. Then comes a more close-in mapping done by a drone that flies in a grid over the site taking hundreds, if not thousands, of very high-resolution photographs of the location. And we finish with a photographic survey on the ground. This documentation is then laboriously assembled and woven together by a team of computer programmers and modelers using 3D software to rebuild the entire scene as a virtual model.
JS: And what is it that's being sculpted exactly, what's the material?
JG: It is a virtual building material called polygonal mesh. It's similar to chicken wire, a flat surface that you can pull up and down and give shape to. And then on top of the mesh surface we carefully layer different textures to create moss, heather, tufts of grass, puddles or whatever it is that we need, as if we were building an actual garden. It has all these funny kinds of relationships to more traditional art forms, like drawing, painting and sculpture. It's an incredibly precise and time-consuming process, with each detail constructed by hand over a period of two years by a team working in Austria, Germany, Ireland and Eastern Europe.
JS: At this point everything remains inanimate and has not yet been launched into any form of motion. How do you move on to the next stage?
JG: I've worked for many years with a tool called real-time 3D. It's a technology used widely in the video-gaming industry that allows us to create virtual worlds. It has an engine, known as a game engine, which is basically a sort of camera. In a virtual world, the function of the engine is to look out through a virtual lens to see what's in front of it, which is actually just data (the mesh structure that we had previously built), and to translate this data in real time, 60 to 80 times a second, into an image that we can recognize. Each of these 60 to 80 frames a second - a torrent of images depicting light, reflections, textures, movements, - is shown to us on the screen and then instantly discarded. It all happens at such speed that everything seems real to the human eye. The engine also allows us to introduce the element of time, which is central to my work. The first animating layer that we created in Leaf Work was light. We brought in the sun and programmed it to move across the sky at the speed of the earth's turn. We introduced dawn and dusk, shadows, these kinds of things, which unfold in real time.
JS: So if we were to sit in front of the work for an entire day, we would witness that entire day unfold in front of us in actual time?
JG: Precisely.
JS: And would the weather change?
JG: To a certain extent. The sun is in a different position in the sky every day of every year, from its highest point in the summer to its lowest in the winter. The colour of the light also changes from a slightly bluish tone in the winter to a more golden hue as it heads into late spring. The grass in the landscape browns a little in the summer months, different cloud formations come and go, and there's a bit of virtual wind to keep things lively. But there's no rain or snow. It's largely a portrait of the landscape as it was during the days that it was originally documented, the record of a place, and a moment. And that moment is then launched into an unspooling, scrolling reality across the year. But the actual moment itself, like the physical geographic reality that I discovered at the site, is fixed at that time. I think very carefully when it comes to choosing the time of the year, whether it be spring, summer, autumn or winter, depending on the kind of emotional look and feel that I'm searching for.
JS: You already mentioned drawing, painting, and sculpture, but it's interesting that the work - like many others you have made - also draws on elements of photography (in the frozen moment), of film (in its unspooling narrative) and of performance (in the movement of its central character). Let's perhaps talk about her a little more. You decided quite early on to work with a real-life dancer to create the leaf-covered figure. How did you go about finding the right person?
JG: I have worked for many years with Esther Balfe, a former Forsythe dancer who is a professor at the MUK, Vienna, and together we formulated some movement ideas for the leaf figure. Part of the process was identifying the right performer, so we set up a series of auditions with the specific intention of finding an older female dancer. We were thrilled when Finola Cronin, a long-time collaborator of Pina Bausch, came to the casting. The moment she walked in the door it was immediately clear to all of us that we had found our person.
JS: And what happened then?
JG: We rented a dance studio in Vienna and Finola performed each day over the course of a week wearing a motion capture suit, which recorded her precise movements through sensors embedded in the suit at the head, knees, ankles, wrists and elsewhere. These movements were then sent wirelessly to a computer and animated in real time a prototype character that we had built and placed within our virtual landscape.
JS: What sort of choreography had you developed for her, what were her instructions?
JG: We mapped onto the floor of the studio a solar wheel, which is a cross inside a circle. And we asked Finola to perform a mournful walk around this circle, as a sort of lament. And it is a lament for a planet which is heating up and causing untold damage to human but also non-human life forms like trees, plants, coral reefs, or small creatures that can't move or hide and must endure this heat in place. We asked Finola to try and manifest this sense of entrapment, almost agony. She was extraordinary, and the leaf-covered figure that she became reflects this weariness, this sense of resignation.
JS: Hence the solar wheel as the choreographic pattern.
JG: Precisely. The sun has this Janus-like quality: it is the giver of life, at the heart of all life, but in too great a quantity it can quickly become the taker of life. In terms of instructions, we gave Finola a vocabulary of movements and gestures to draw on, which she then put together and performed in all sorts of different ways. We recorded each and every one of them, almost five hundred in total, and they now sit in the work's database.
JS: There is an extraordinary amount of detail in the leaves that cover the character in the finished work. How were you able to achieve this?
JG: Soon after the session at the dance studio, a group of us including the work's producer, the modeler, myself, and a younger dancer who was approximately the same build as Finola, travelled to my sister's farm in Ireland. We harvested fresh spring leaves from an ancient oak tree and with the help of an amazing local craftswoman called Geraldine Wilson were able to build a suit from them. Each individual leaf was then photographed to capture not just its colour but its own particular shape and individual topography. A leaf is of course a solar panel, uniquely designed to capture the energy of the sun and translate this into food for the plant. The photographs were then brought back to the studio in Vienna where each leaf was rebuilt by hand as a virtual replica of itself. Once that had been done, they were integrated into a portrait of the figure that we had developed. To begin with the leaves remain static, even as the figure moves, and it requires a huge amount of time and skill to reach a point that the leaves begin to shake and move slightly with each step that the figure takes.
JS: As wonderfully complex as this all is, it's not absolutely necessary to understand how the work was made in order to experience it.
JG: Not at all. And 'experience' is exactly the right word. When I set out to make Leaf Work, I was trying to find a way around, or rather through, the saturated coverage in newspapers about the climate crisis. We can read every day what is happening, we know that we have too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, that we're trapping too much heat, that the planet is suffering. But what is missing for me in the reporting is something that might actually 'move' the public. Because when we are moved by something, we are affected emotionally but we can also be prompted to get up and do something. Leaf Work is my attempt to do that, without words or sound.
JS: As much as the work is intended to alert us to a grave and worsening situation, I also a sense of certain optimism in it.
JG: The instructions that we gave Finola during the choreography asked her to become gradually more exhausted over the course of the day. Her head begins to drop, her shoulders slump, and as evening approaches she is struggling and barely able to walk. During the night she moves slowly, as if in a trance. And by the time the sun comes up each day, her energy has returned and she is revived. Like the spring leaves that she wears, she herself is a symbol of rebirth and renewal.
JS: That's perhaps a good place to end. Thank you, John, it's been fascinating to listen to you.
John Gerrard, Leaf Work, 2020. Installation view at Phileas – The Austrian Office for Contemporary Art, 2023. Photo: kunst.dokumentation.com / Manuel Carreon Lopez