adam barker-mill

Authors

Owen Griffith

Carolyn Barker-Mill

Rozemin Keshvani

Editor

Rozemin Keshvani

Design

Modern Activity

Publisher

Bartha Contemporary Ltd.

Printer

Druckerei Kettler, Bönen, Germany

Copyright

© Bartha Contemporary Ltd, 2015, all rights reserved

ISBN

978 0 9933621 2 5

All photos Adam Barker-Mill, except for

Inverleith House show installation shots by Jason Lowe, pp. 23–39, 190–1, 210–1

Installation medium shots, Ambient Light in BT building by Guy Moreton, pp. 52–3

Installation shot, Nastro Azzurro in Botao Gallery by Eiji Watanabe, p. 308

Installation shot, Peacock Visual Arts, Aberdeen by Mike Davidson, p. 204

Chromats 1, 2, 3 by Pool by Thomas Struth, pp. 256, 270 Chromat 8 at Laure Genillard by Simon Brown, p. 343–6

Installation shots in Paiboon Residence, Sunrise / Sunset, Horizon by Alan Johnston, pp. 50, 324

Installation shot, ColourViewer by Piet Meijer, p. 80–1

Hiroshi Sugimoto, p. 121

Copyright

Adam Barker-Mill, © Adam Barker-Mill, courtesy Bartha Contemporary

Hiroshi Sugimoto, © Hiroshi Sugimoto, courtesy Pace Gallery, p. 121

Claes Oldenburgh, © 1966 Claes Oldenburg © Tate, London 2015, p. 178

Josef Albers, © Tate, London 2015, p. 263

Frank Stella, © Tate, London 2015, p. 264

Richard Hamilton, © Museum Ludwig, Cologne, © Rheinisches Bildarchiv, p. 178

Jasper Johns, © Peter Horree / Alamy, p. 264

Suspicion, 1941, © Pictorial Press Ltd / Alamy, p. 213

Metropolis, 1927, © World History Archive / Alamy, p. 249

(Previous spread) Horizon proposal for ILAA, 2014

9

Irreplaceable you

11

The more poetic, the more real Rozemin Keshvani

15

Ambient Light works

67

Timelapse photography

81

Filtered light

91

Skylight

131

Experiment and design

147

Watercolours

165

Organising artificial light

193

Light to look at

227

Lamps and lanterns

245

Ringstack

257

Chromats and Light Machines

356

Biography and curriculum vitae

358

List of works

Carolyn Barker-Mill

365 Acknowledgements

Ambient Light

6/7

Irreplaceable you Adam is as enigmatic, elusive, mysterious and free spirited as he was on our first meeting nearly 35 years ago and that is why I love him. I was advised before I met him that he looked like a Greek God and would be just right for me. I was young, so young, really young and had just walked out of my job in that rarest of things, an Edinburgh commercial (I use that word loosely) gallery called Graeme Murray (a job found for me by my tutor, Alan Johnston) to work on a film being shot by Barney Platts-Mills in Gaelic in remote Argyllshire, Scotland. I realise now that the key members of the crew and the landowners on whose estates we were based were Adam’s circle of what would now be termed Old Bohemia of Notting Hill, although then they were youngish Bohemia.

But the cast and the art department were a mix of working class Glasgow gangland young offenders and young artists from Edinburgh, all in all an explosive mix. And sure enough opposites attract. Adam was Director of Photography and led a crew of camera assistants, focus puller, clapper loader, grips and electricians; he seemed powerful and distant.

He was / is very handsome and despite his tweed jacket and knitted jumpers and checked shirts (I was a punk and styled myself after Debbie Harry) there was a gentleness and charisma and wonderful talent which was hard to ignore.

Our courtship began at a 21st birthday party in Craignish Castle and was sealed signed and delivered when Adam took me up in a helicopter over the Corryvreckan as he filmed the bubbling mass. The rest as they say is history or at least another story to be told somewhere else.

In those days, Adam worked back to back on films. He was admired for his skill in naturalistic lighting, for framing a shot and for his ability to film with a steady hand-held camera. I think his new life being with me and my artist friends gave Adam the confidence to make his own work and so Adam decided after one of his films had won an Oscar not to follow the director, his childhood friend, James Scott to Hollywood but to give up movies altogether on a high and stay in Southampton and make art.

Adam had come from a family of artists and his natural abilities were much in evidence. He is someone who can make a beautiful mark, perfectly place furniture, objects in room and definitely could have been a master of Ikebana judging by his daily flower arrangements from our garden at the farm. When I first came to the farm, Adam had recently taken it in hand after one of his tenants had given it up.

Another side of Adam which took me years to puzzle out; Adam the landowner, shy and reluctant like his father before him but dutiful never the less. The pretty Tudor farmhouse stood alone surrounded by fields of Jersey cows. We set to making our own garden with no prior knowledge but lots of enthusiasm. I drew out the pattern of the beds to make our ornamental kitchen garden while Adam fired arrows into the

air to determine where we should plant the plants in our shrubbery. Adam’s interest in colour was evident even then as he deliberately sought colour combinations of plants for maximum dazzle. Adam designed and made the furniture and lamps for our new home and sculpture for our garden.

We had our weekend flat in London and Adam designed the neon blue lighting which illuminated the interiors and built into the walls some of his own sculptures so that they could be seen for the first time as Adam intended without wires. We collaborated with Claudio Silvestrin on the interiors, a process repeated with Mike Rundell on our present London house to great success.

Throughout our lives, art has remained at the forefront. We have made it, collected it, made friends through it, travelled to the far corners of the world to see it and it has always been there for us in our time of need.

An artist has to be alone. Adam is one of the few men I know who is completely happy alone. In fact he craves solitude. It is necessary for him to make his work and to think about his work. He is inspired by nature and his studio in Southampton at our farm is where he makes his best work. There, he plays the piano several hours a day, does yoga, walks on his slack line and stands on his head.

Recently he has taken up running again; I think a challenge laid down by his friend, Richard Tuttle who has also started running again and is a fellow contender for the Peter Pan prize for age defying artists.

Adam is curious about life, engaged in everything around him. His early studies at Oxford have given him a profound interest in French and German literature and he is an avid reader of those genres. His regret is that he didn’t learn Russian as he would love to read those authors in their original tongue. Perhaps it is not too late.

When things began to get serious between me and Adam all those years ago, he asked me never to try and change him and warned me that he never wanted to get divorced. I accepted both those conditions without regret.

Wall Panel ( Riverside One ), 1993, opalised perspex, tungsten ‘daylight’ and coloured bulb, dimmer switch, 120 × 10 cm

1

Ambient Light

8/9

Ambient Light

26 / 27

Sunrise / Sunset ( for Paiboon Residence ), 2012, concrete painted white, 250 × 259 × 100 cm

Ambient Light

50 / 51

Ambient Light

52 / 53

Blue Column, 2014, MDF painted matt blue, seven chambers, colour-changing LED lamps, switches, 180 × 32 × 32 cm (Following spread) 5 Colour Boxes, 2015, valchromat, aluminium, vinyl paint and LED lamps, 27 × 127 × 23 cm

Lamps and lanterns

242 / 243

Ringstack, 2012, welded mild-steel painted white, LED lamp, 721 × ∅ 130 cm

Ringstack

254 / 255

Chromat 1 (centre), Chromat 2 (right), and Chromat 3 (left)

It would have been strange if in an epoch when the popular art par excellence, the cinema, is a book of pictures, the poets had not tried to compose pictures for meditative and refined minds which are not content with the crude imaginings of the makers of films. These last will become more perceptive, and one can predict the day when, the photograph and the cinema having become the only form of publication in use, the poet will have a freedom heretofore unknown.

Guillaume Apollinaire

176

Faire un tableau comme on enroule une bobine-cinéma.

Marcel Duchamp

177

The Chromat series The Chromats and other Light Machines represent the most controlled of Barker-Mill’s works. First created when the artist began to devote himself entirely to his art, these works are, without doubt, among Barker-Mills signature works. Each Chromat consists of a machine-like object which houses numerous coloured light bulbs operating according to a predetermined programme, often hidden within the work itself. Sophisticated electrical machines control coloured light in a highly organised and systematic manner. Typically two different sets of coloured lights appear in distinct chambers, the colours changing over time according to their predetermined sequences. The result is the presentation of two colours one within the other as the bulbs move through their timed sequences until the patterns eventually repeat. These are complex frame-sculptures, in which the crucial parts of the framing often remain hidden. Drawing remains static as a result of the nature of the structures devised by the artist and the position of the viewer. Colour changes. Colour and drawing are synthesised in each machine.

The neologism ‘chromat’ is of the artist’s own devising. He writes that the term ‘…Chromat is a combination of chromatic and automatic’.178 The term designates an automatic machine (one being autonomous and continuous in its operation) concerned with colour, thus one which is also chromatic. However, these automatic machines are also concerned with colour in duration. This is appropriate, for in some sense the Chromat is distantly related to music.

Indeed the word chromatic, indicates in music the notes not belonging to the diatonic scale of the key in which a passage is written, but rather, in consideration of a musical scale, notes ascending, or descending by semi tones. The word also, of course, relates to colour. The last part of the neologism comes from ‘automatic’ and is self-explanatory.

A musical analogy is implied by the title given to this series of works, but not apparently by the work itself. However, not only is a machine implied by the title used for the series, but also set of rules and instructions governing the running of that machine, a ‘score’ as such, and this indeed proves to be the case here. The whole is thus necessarily complex.

Chromats and Light Machines

256 / 257

(This spread and previous spread) Boxlite with Aperture, 2008, set of colour filters, fluorescent bulb, 30 × 30 × 12 cm

234

Chromats and Light Machines

314 / 315