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Extracts from a conversation between
Richard Wentworth and Canon Keith Walker.
Winchester Cathedral. 27.01.01.
Keith Walker Your work involves the idea
of disturbing convention, of looking for hidden meanings and discovering
perspectives that aren’t immediately familiar. What was it
about the Cathedral that caught your attention, and why?
Richard Wentworth The absolute miracle is that this place actually
exists. The building has a definable series of volumes that meet
each other more or less coherently. Sometimes there are hilarious
moments when they don’t, where you know there wasn’t a
set of drawings and they never got planning permission.
I happened to see an American book in a second-hand bookshop which
speculates on what the timber work was like in these buildings.
To build everything at the top it’s got to be supported. We’re
talking about people working with candles and ropes and, if they’re
lucky, a donkey and a horse. There are drawings that speculate how
to put that scale of timber form-work up at those heights, and then
find a way of removing the support. Terrifying, courageous stuff!
As you move through the Cathedral, there’s this tooth-and-grain
to the building, which just never lets up. It’s drenched in
the fall of feet. There’s as much memory in the stones that
have no text on them as there is in the ones that are very busy
telling you this guy was rich, or this woman was important. Every
component is incredibly talkative. That was what completely involved
me when I first came. There was also the way you talked about sacred
and profane space, about the threshold of this building.
KW I was taking up the mediaeval perception that there is ordinary
human space, and there is sacred space. Our word ‘profane’
comes from Latin roots, literally meaning ‘before the temple’.
We have corrupted the word and only use it pejoratively. Then there’s
the sacred space within the sacred building, which is reckoned to
be an instrument and a pointer to the Kingdom of God. A mediaeval
person coming to this building would feel and think that as they
came through the doors they passed through a threshold of consciousness.
The Cathedral would unfold, like a flower unfolding, with the story
of salvation.
RW The moment you spontaneously described the move from secular
to sacred, I wondered if I could make something like a doorframe
that could also function as a trestle or support. Think how many
trestles are at work every day and what they are doing. I used steel
because it is as pervasive in the modern world as stone was in the
culture that built the Cathedral. It’s in everything, every
doorway you walk through. It is what makes the world not fall down.
Every door and every window plays its part in the realm between
public and private, reflecting how sophisticated the codes that
we follow in urban space are. Sometimes we enjoy small acts of transgression.
Some spaces are permanently contested. For example, pillows are
absolutely domestic and private, but incredibly symbolic, very recognisable.
We immediately have a trigger mechanism that takes us into the privacy
of the pillow. It is the site of all our most extravagant fantasies;
it’s where we dream, and it’s where we go to places we
can’t believe we’ve been to, because we didn’t think
we even meant to go there. So in a sense it’s a site of uncontrollable
individual expression.
The most time-consuming aspect of Recall was something that doesn’t
actually appear in the finished work, which is very like the experience
of being in a church. I built a huge bell out of wood in my studio,
about 4.5 meters in diameter at the base. More and more timber was
used, the shape was getting more and more ridiculous, and yet I
knew this was never going to be part of the finished piece. It was
a form. It was a thing you make a cake in, a thing you make a hat
on. It was a huge and elaborate tradition. A jig. A template.
Then, with my youngest son advising me on how stupid I was being,
a full-size ‘cast’ of a bell was made out of metal cable,
which was like a three-dimensional drawing made up of wire longitudes
and latitudes. This gave a taste of a certain scale of production
which is completely absent in the finished product. I think that
because people don’t generally make anything any more, not
even dinner, we have some very funny absences from our experiences.
I’ve never seen a dead person, but it would have been absolutely
impossible 50 or 60 years ago for me not to have seen one. When
we started to take the cable off the wooden structure, nothing was
left. All this desire, design, preparation, calculation, focus,
had evaporated before me. It was folded up and lying neatly on a
blanket. I tell you this not because I’m trying to romanticise
the process of making, but just to show the way that beliefs can
collapse in on themselves, and then expand. There was a moment of
breathing life back into the work when installing it. I thought
‘Yeah! Now you’re doing what I wanted you to do.’
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