::: ART, CRAFT & DESIGN

Creative whimsy
from a master of
the unexpected: II

Continued | But Hall’s work is nothing if not multi-dimensional. So on the interior side of each glass panel, in astoundingly regular calligraphy, he has engraved snippets of stories, lyrical little narratives that speculate on putative owners of the objects, and their emotional connections to music.

It’s tempting to wonder if one such mini-narrative contains deliberate self-description:

In the glorious isolation of the deep space of under blankets he lay curled up, the ear-piece of his crystal set firmly in place. Strange clicks, whistles & beeps filled his head while he scanned a dark universe for signs of life. At last he made contact with a world not yet gone to bed & they spoke to him in the intoxicating & forbidden alien language of pop songs.

For Hall’s own antennae are tuned to an uncommon frequency. They pick up the static of voices long since silenced, faint echoes of songs long since played out. From the deep space of his imagination come the intimate details of individual triumphs and tragedies, painstakingly fabricated in aluminium and glass, and they speak directly to the child in all of us.

Our lives are in a state of constant forward motion and the only time we look back is in the rear-vision mirror

“Quite often, those things I make”, says Hall, “they’re like little metal toys. So I might make a locomotive that’s crashed in the bottom of a cabinet, or a plane, lots of cars … it’s again that notion of an unattainable childhood. They have this nostalgic connotation, but I think there is also something about the notion of travel and moving on. Our lives are in a state of constant forward motion and the only time we look back is in the rear-vision mirror”.

“My piece called Things He Once Was, for example, has a train track that loops around, intertwining in an out of the drawers and through tunnels, and then the final set of drawers is this crashed locomotive. But along the track, engraved on the glass, is a sort of a repetitive refrain ‘… things he once did, things he once saw, things he once was …’, on and on it goes, and I wanted to get this clicketty-clack Johnny Cash kind of rhythm to it, and it’s really a way of trying to work out how we remember, how we classify and order our experience”.

I love the fact that there are still idiots like myself that are prepared to spend extended periods of time in making an object …

Patrick Hall happily admits to having a deep respect for old-style artisan values. “To me, craftsmanship involves spending an extended period of time with the material. I like the notion of letting a material speak for itself, by being around it a lot”.

Eschewing time saving 21st century techniques, Hall lavishes many weeks on each of his hand-made creations. His way of working, he explains, ties in directly with his themes, and he believes that craftsmanship is due for a renaissance.

“For me, it’s almost a form of protest. It’s a totally ridiculous thing to do, but in a world that’s reduced to the sound-bite or the click of a mouse, I love the fact that there are still idiots like myself that are prepared to spend extended periods of time in making an object”.

He calls his cabinets ‘acts of obsession’. “In terms of the modern world they’re a total anachronism, but I like that – it’s my little stand against being swept along, my way of clinging to the log for a little longer before being swept downstream”. ¶

PART I | PART II

 

EXCLUSIVE: A moving feast — a Patrick Hall portfolio

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