The Recent Sculptures of Michael Pennie

This is how I think of Michael Pennie’s work:

‘Little by little it comes into view like a condensing cloud: from the virtual state it passes into the actual; and its outlines become more distinct and its surface takes on colour …’

The quote is taken from a wider discussion on the processes of recollection, whereby a thoughtful human subject achieves the feat of retrieving an absent moment. The philosopher, Henri Bergson, likens this act of remembrance to the focusing of a camera. Michael Pennie uses the word ‘distillation’ but the sentiment and processes are the same: the past is retrieved as sensation.

In By Fits and Starts, twenty-two miniature bronzes are mounted onto board to constitute a host of materialized memories: some specific and personal, some generic and social. His illusions – to people and things – are like tiny monuments to figures from the past: family and friends who once gathered on a beach, sculptors and artists who once contributed to the History of Art. ‘All the work has its origins in real life and in experience with people,’ he says, having moved these moments into the realms of visual perception.

The ‘sculptures’ are mounted on individual plinths, and clearly pay homage to the established vocabularies of the three-dimensional form. One can see references to the ‘horizontal works’ of William Turnbull for example, as well as the ‘formal poetry’ of Chilida. In this respect, one might see them as the accumulation of past knowledge and its movement into action and physical perception. ‘In my head I have an image of a board where things are moved,’ says Pennie. ‘The board is a manifestation of a great deal of activity.’

Michael Pennie is best known for his sculptures in wood, teaching and as a collector of African carvings. In many respects, these bronze pieces consequently mark a significant departure for a man whose career has already spanned over fifty years. The exhibition is therefore more than an act of recovering the past: it is also a celebration of the becoming of the artist as a ‘total’ sculptor. In the making of bronzes, he comments, he is now involved in a fast and exciting process of production and addition. He sees casting in terms of a series of ‘little events’, such as modelling, moulding or ‘a pouring’.

So as well as retrospection (or re-inspection), there is also an allusion to the future. For as Bergson says, the present is the instant in which time goes by … yet it also speaks of a relation to the world. To be caught in the moment of trying to recover a memory involves an attitude whereby one lets go of the past, allowing this memory to re-enter the world as an image of itself and as an embodied relation. ‘But there is much more between past and present than a difference of degree,’ Bergson urges. ‘My present is that which interests me, which lives for me and, in a word, that which summons me to action.’

This notion of a past-in-the-present or the artefact as memory-image increases our awareness of the forces or intensities within and between objects. There is something in this movement towards the world that seems appropriate to an understanding of Pennie’s work in situ. The magnitude or intensity of the past is strengthened as it comes to light, leaving the realms of personal memory and experience to enter the field of social and aesthetic relations. Pennie says, in a typically understated way, ‘There are clues here … I hope for the history to emanate from the object.’

My task has been to write something about Michael Pennie’s work, to provide a context for looking. I would like to finish with the observation that – in this instance, more than others - looking involves the presence of people and objects; the idea of ‘living’ with each other and allowing oneself to be affected by concrete relations.
The bronzes are intended to work on you, and the gallery is the field of their operations. Bergson concludes that: ‘To picture is not to remember.’ It is the ‘continuity of becoming … the living reality.’

The work is the work, (to be sure), but also the time spent with the work – its duration.

Click here to see the work of Michael Pennie.