- Venue
- Bury Sculpture Center.
- Location
- North West England
There are a few artists from all fields of the spectrum who steal the world from us and return it as their own vision. I can never walk down a long corridor without thinking of Stanley Kubricks haunting imagery in the Shinning or even seeing a skull or dissected animal without thinking of Damien Hirst’s sparkling derive through the macabre.
Hilary Jack is one of these artists.
Before attending Jacks preview of ‘The Late Great Planet Earth’ I stood in my kitchen, preparing a meal, the door to the back garden was open, revealing the ramshackle porch/outhouse. The wood has rotted in parts and so in fact have the ill fitting, replacement panels but as fragile as they are, they work, so does the toilet which given the lack of door merely suggests human engagement, our private moments exposed in a rickety hotchpotch shell, reserved for the brazen.
If I go back further to when I was a child in Northern Ireland, during the marching season, there was and still is the practice of ‘Boni Hut’ making. Open patches of grassy land, playing fields, played host to huge bonfires whose flames left the ground scorched throughout the year. The local kids would collect for the Boni from scrap and timber yards, from anywhere with something to burn. A huge collection of crates, car tires and miscellaneous debris would be amassed and with this the building blocks for a Boni Hut would be found.
A typical Boni Hut would have doors, crates and random items carefully placed together without the use of nails or any other secure fittings. The size and relative opulence of the hut would depend on the age of the builders and their standing. Larger boys would have huge constructions with sofas, elaborate chairs made from worn tires and makeshift tables, strewn with empty lighter fluid bottles, pierced cans and maybe even an old porn mag.
The younger kids would wait until the older groups were away then venture into the huts, sitting in the smoky chairs with the strips of sunlight pouring through the slight gaps in the makeshift walls and roof. The young ones would build huts of their own only to find them destroyed the next day as mark of dominance by the older kids or rival gangs. Eventually as the 11th night descended all the huts would be submerged in flames and the local community would gather around the flames like ancient tribes.
The instinct to build a sanctuary away from rules and social norms is inherent in these children and in artists. As an Artist, my studio is my ‘Boni Hut’ and where the purpose of the Boni had no truck with me personally, the space within still holds a place of risk and solitude found today.
These were my personal moments and memories and now they are interwoven with the experience of Hilary Jacks work, I no longer encounter these events as they are but instead find myself thinking of the uneven, loaded objects, even more so having attended ‘The Late Great Planet Earth’ and ‘Rogue Open’ studios, another one of which is approaching this month. This exhibition presents sculpture and assemblage, forging nature and manmade structures bridging archaic and digital technology.
The pieces are generously spaced around the Neo Classical gallery and the recurrent theme of the of apocalypse and social hysteria makes the journey around the show feel like an anthropological museum study, where medieval artifice meets spiritual experience and true crime. If these ideas were not manifest as they are, Jack could make the transition into film were Lynch meets Beuys. An alpine horror where society breaks down held together by threadbare faith in the beauty of nature where even there, lurk dangerous, reclusive artists.
‘The Late Great Planet Earth’ continues in Bury Sculpture Center until Febuary 27th 2016 and Rogue Open Studios opens October 23rd at Crusader Mill.
