Guy Taplin - The nature of home 2015

GUY TAPLIN

1. Blackbirds

carved and painted driftwood 28 x 25 x 31 cms 11 x 97⁄8 x 12 1⁄4 ins

front cover detail

Linnets (no. 26)

the nature of home

GUY TAPLIN Autumn 2015

www.messums.com 28 Cork Street, London W1S 3NG Telephone: +44 (0)20 7437 5545

Birds. We watch them, study them, respect them, worship them, kill them and eat them. Their images have decorated cave walls, led armies in conquests.

Their magic has inspired myths and stories. Their mysteries have driven some mad and others to the ends of the earth. We live amongst them; they live beside us. We hate some and love others. Birds and humans have many connections and our relationships are both ancient and important. We cannot escape birds and the fate of the birds cannot escape us. We are bonded, bound together.

I still dream of flying. I dream of being feathered, of being a bird. A hybrid human avian!

Guy Taplin’s birds do something strange, strangely successful. They very cleverly explore the relationship we have with these animals and find the parts of us that we see in birds. Each species, indeed each individual, has a unique character and however pragmatic we are, however ‘scientific’, it is joyfully impossible to not ally aspects of these traits with those of our own. If you own a bird feeder you will know Nuthatches as techy bullies, Great Spotted Woodpeckers as callous brutes, Siskins as delicate dandies and Greenfinches as gang members. It’s all nonsense … but it’s all true too – how wonderful!

In this collection of well known garden birds he has examined these sometimes obvious, sometimes subtle personalities and very skilfully crafted them into the psyches of his subjects. But the real triumph is that they do not mask the real character of the birds, birds which are pared down to simple forms. This reveals the artist as a keen observer of bird behaviour and someone with a deep understanding of our own. But also as someone who can conjure them into an artistic embrace with an irresistible charm. These transpositions are thus just so covetous. We love them because they portray chimeras, ourselves and the beautiful things we would be, if only we could.

Chris Packham New Forest 2015 Naturalist and Television Presenter

2. Blackcaps

carved and painted driftwood 18 x 21 x 16 cms 7 1⁄8 x 81⁄4 x 61⁄4 ins

Contents 1. Blackbirds 2. Blackcaps 3. Black Redstarts 4. Bullfinches 5. Chaffinches 6. Coot 7. Cuckoos 8. Preening Curlew I 9. Preening Curlew II 10. Under Curlew 11. Dartford Warblers 12. Dippers 13. Egret 14. Fieldfares and Worm 15. Goldcrests 16. Golden Orioles 17. 4 Goldfinches 18. Grey Wagtails 19. Hobby and Six Goldfinches 20. 3 House Sparrows 21. Jays 22. Kestrel and Shrew 23. Kingfisher and Fish I 24. Kingfisher and Fish II 25. Lapwing 26. Linnets 27. Little Grebe 28. Long-tailed Tits 29. Mallard 30. Mistle Thrushes 31. Moorhen

32. Nightingales 33. Owl, 2 Wrens and Shrew – Panel 34. 6 Owls, 2 Shrews, 4 Worms – Panel 35. Pied Wagtails 36. Plover 37. Pochard I 38. Pochard II 39. Redstarts 40. Redwings 41. Ring Ouzels 42. Robin 43. Robins 44. Rooks 45. Sanderling 46. Six Sanderling 47. Shorebird 48. Shoveler 49. Song Thrushes 50. Starlings 51. Swifts and Young – Panel 52. Teal 53. Tufted Duck 54. Water Rail 55. Wheatears 56. Wrens 57. Wren and Worm 58. Wrens and Young – Panel 59. Wrens and Worm 60. Yellow Wagtails 61. Barn Owl and Snake

3. Black Redstarts

carved and painted driftwood 15 x 21 x 18 cms 5 7⁄8 x 81⁄4 x 71⁄8 ins

the nature of home Emily Dickinson, one of Guy Taplin’s favourite poets, wrote to a friend: “I hope you love birds too. It is economical. It saves going to heaven.” For the increasingly reclusive 19th century American poet, it saved leaving her family home in Amherst Massachusetts and ultimately her room.

A view of a New England garden and its resident and migrant birds sustained the vision of Emily Dickinson, and this is the theme that Guy and Robina Jack have chosen for the heart of their new joint exhibition at Messum’s. Our gardens are now nature reserves and millions of human-made feeding stations are creating a wild abundance on domestic doorsteps while nature is being starved out of a farm-efficient countryside.

Guy and Robina first met in the 1970s when he, an East End kid, had careered through a number of creative and entrepreneurial careers and was now working as the Bird Man of Regent’s Park. She, having grown up on an Oxfordshire farm, then travelled around the world for two years and taught in the East End, had taken a gardening job in the London park.

With no artistic training, and no natural gift for carpentry, Guy had started to whittle crude images of his ornamental waterfowl charges in wood. A whim was fast turning into an obsession – even as he agonised over a possible vocation as a Zen Buddhist monk.

Robina remembers: “I’d heard about the Bird Man and expected an old chap in tweeds, plus-fours and horn-rimmed glasses behind a pair of binoculars. I couldn’t believe it when this cheeky oik appeared. We

all used to have lunch together in Bedford College and Guy would just hold forth – just as he still does. He won me over – no: he wore me down! – with his cheek. He was so intriguing, but also such a troubled soul. I had no idea where it was all going, especially as half the time he seemed set for the monastery.”

By force of will and countless acts of repetition, Guy honed his eye, hand and talent as a maker of emblematic birds – using recycled materials from the outset: discarded rowing boats from the Regent’s Park lake were transformed into swans; toppled telegraph poles became flocks of herons. He left the park in 1977, opting for a succession of Thames-side studios rather than a monastic cell. Robina set up a stained-glass workshop in another river-side former warehouse. All this starting out came just before a Dickensian scene began to be transformed into the swish, glass-andsteel glamour of Docklands.

Guy and his work had been noticed from the outset – writer/philosopher Laurens van der Post had visited his island retreat; Linda McCartney had answered his appeal to rescue the burgeoning population of Canada geese from culling (she chartered a plane and flew the threatened flock to husband Paul’s Scottish estate on the Mull of Kintyre); early buyers of his sculpted birds included actors Robert Mitchum, Sian Phillips and Una Stubbs.

Robina and Guy had finally got to living together in London, but a settled future, and the raising of a family, clearly lay elsewhere. But where, exactly?

4. Bullfinches

carved and painted driftwood 22 x 20 x 18 cms 85⁄8 x 77⁄8 x 71⁄8 ins

Guy hit on the spot by accident. Returning from a trip to Norfolk with friends, he persuaded the party to take a detour via the tiny Essex port of Wivenhoe, which he had visited long before, and where he mistakenly thought there was a car ferry. But here was instant enchantment. “Wivenhoe seemed to me a place of dreams,’ he says. “There was an infinite quality to it and the people looked interesting. It was a sea port on the edge of the marshes, with a strange light and atmosphere. I knew at once I wanted to live there.” He sought – and bought – a small cottage that afternoon.

The Taplins so loved their bolt-hole for weekend escapes that soon they didn’t want to return to London, but instead found a larger base in a backstreet of this Bohemian backwater on the coastal edge of Essex. Built for a Victorian master mariner, Anglesea Cottage is where they raised their children, Nancy Rose and Sam Neville, in an atmosphere where it was – and is – perfectly natural for everyone to spend their lives making things. This was the way of humankind throughout our history, until it was lost in modern times, in the West at least.

Now the tarred façade of Anglesea Cottage and the sail-loft alongside are joined by two huge green antique metal buoys bought from the Trinity House HQ in Harwich, when marine markers were replaced with plastic. They stand like wobbly sentries, still lighting up at night for any lost ships that might be navigating a course through the puddles of an unadopted, potholed road and over a railway bridge.

Stepping through the front door is like entering a galleon, with each cabin-like room clapboarded like old boats and brightly painted like dinghies. This domestic vessel is suffused with a watery light. For whenever they were bored in the early days, Guy put in

a new port-hole window which Robina then filled with colourful stained glass panels generally decorated with birds or fish and bright borders. The cottage seems to be a floating museum for salty folk art (ships’ figureheads, scrimshaw work, decoy ducks, model boats and sailors’ shellwork valentine gifts).

The myriad Taplin collections have inspired some of Robina’s recent ceramic images. For a few years ago she tired of noxious chemical processes and especially the acids which secure those intense stained-glass colours, and anyway found that she had said all she wanted to say in that demanding medium.

So then came a smooth transition from glass to clay – the new line swiftly endorsed with the commissioning of a collection for Clarence House and the Prince’s Trust. Robina’s abiding passion is for pattern and colour. Many of her influences hark back to childhood – to farm scenes, trips to Whipsnade Zoo, and her grandmother’s taste in fabrics. These have been augmented by plants, coastal images and, of course, birds. The farmer’s daughter is devoted to chickens and guinea fowl.

Extended backwards, the boat-like Taplin house might also be a wagon train now resting amid a protective encampment of workshop sheds in a garden that could just be a jungle clearing or the centre of a frontier fortress. Here nature can run amok. Besides the common or garden posse of blackbird, robin, wren and starling, there are charms of goldfinches, and chattering clans of long-tailed tits. Blackcaps now over-winter in the Taplin garden rather than making the age-old return flight to Africa, and a stock dove has just nested in the box on the ash tree.

When I visited in July to plot this essay, Guy was busy moving transparent larvae from a box of eggs

5. Chaffinches

carved and painted driftwood 22 x 16 x 20 cms 81⁄2 x 61⁄4 x 7 7⁄8 ins

to branches of privet on the dining table. These tiny creatures will eat their way into great green and yellow horned caterpillars which pupate in autumn to emerge next June as enormous death’s-head hawkmoths raiding beehives, squeaking when threatened and bearing skull-like markings on the backs of their heads. They may amaze the neighbours. Certain Essex naturalists will already have wondered about the origins of a recent influx of Camberwell beauty butterflies spied in the Wivenhoe area. They hadn’t blown in from France but, bred by Guy, had flown off after over-wintering on the Taplin curtains. Meanwhile the light box in the garden at night often attracts pink and green elephant hawk moths, feeding on the rose bay willow herb along the border with the railway bank of the Colchester to Clacton line.

The Taplin garden is an oasis on a major migration route and when Guy pauses from work in the sail loft he can hear oystercatcher, godwit and curlew calling on the marshes. And once the roughing out is done at home, he takes his fledgling wooden birds to be finished off in his second workshop in the airy openness of the Colne Estuary National Nature Reserve at Point Clear.

At high tide this workplace stands on a miniature island – but only last February the floor was a foot under saltwater. Essex at its edgiest.

Guy still finds driftwood close to his seaside studio, but his best hunting ground these days is in Portugal, where painted marine timbers battered by the Atlantic and bleached by the sun provide perfect roosting posts for a new cast of garden birds – more than a few species in this exhibition being attempted for the first time.

Guy’s technique is a mystery even to himself, for he starts without a plan and proceeds without a conscious thought – as if he is freeing the bird from the

wood rather than creating it. His birds don’t mimic life but add to it – touching the human spirit with a symbol of wildness and of our need for the eternal. “They are a key to the inner world,” he says. “A kind of Eden.”

In his drive to work, Guy – now fresh from a first solo show in New England, at the Dowling Walsh Gallery in Maine - is haunted by the words of another American poet, Robert Frost: They cannot scare me with their empty spaces Between stars – on stars void of human races.

I have it in me so much nearer home To scare myself with my own desert places.

But the Taplin home itself is a refuge and a centre of consoling creativity. Using her own moulds, Robina makes high-fired earthenware vessels (plates, bowls, jugs) which she decorates with colour slips and transparent glazes. She applies paper reliefs, draws on the clay and sponges on the colour. It is a personal technique with highly original results. But there is a close relationship between Robina’s ceramics and Guy’s sculpture as both have evolved together in their domestic domain with its atmosphere of shared experience and mutual encouragement.

Three years after the death of their artist son Sam at the age 29 – he had struggled with a severe bipolar disorder for a decade amid the infinite loving support of his parents and sister – Guy and Robina’s latest work, extending over more than 100 kindred pieces, is a moving and marvellous tribute to domestic and family life. Garden birds live with us even though they could fly away at any moment. Here is an evocation, and a celebration, of the nature of home.

Ian Collins *Ian Collins is a writer and curator. His books include Bird on a Wire: The life and art of Guy Taplin.

6. Coot

carved and painted driftwood 12 x 20 x 11 cms 41⁄2 x 7 7⁄8 x 43⁄8 ins

7. Cuckoos

carved and painted driftwood 39 x 32 x 34 cms 15 3⁄8 x 125⁄8 x 133⁄8 ins

8. Preening Curlew I

carved and painted driftwood 65 x 40 x 17 cms 255⁄8 x 15 3⁄4 x 63⁄4 ins

9. Preening Curlew II

carved and painted driftwood 55 x 32 x 33 cms 211⁄2 x 125⁄8 x 13 ins

10. Under Curlew

carved and painted driftwood 45 x 34 x 22 cms 17 1⁄2 x 13 3⁄8 x 8 5⁄8 ins

11. Dartford Warblers

carved and painted driftwood 22 x 15 x 17 cms 85⁄8 x 57⁄8 x 61⁄2 ins

12. Dippers

carved and painted driftwood 21 x 33 x 15 cms 81⁄4 x 13 x 57⁄8 ins

13. Egret

carved and painted driftwood 79 x 51 x 18 cms 311⁄8 x 201⁄8 x 67⁄8 ins

14. Fieldfares and Worm

carved and painted driftwood 33 x 43 x 21 cms 13 x 167⁄8 x 81⁄4 ins

15. Goldcrests

16. Golden Orioles

carved and painted driftwood 24 x 30 x 23 cms 91⁄2 x 113⁄4 x 9 ins

carved and painted driftwood 14 x 10 x 11 cms 51⁄2 x 37⁄8 x 43⁄8 ins

17. 4 Goldfinches

18. Grey Wagtails

carved and painted driftwood 20 x 19 x 22 cms 7 7⁄8 x 7 1⁄2 x 81⁄2 ins

carved and painted driftwood 18 x 27 x 19 cms 7 1⁄8 x 105⁄8 x 71⁄2 ins

19. Hobby and Six Goldfinches

carved and painted driftwood 65 x 100 x 50 cms 253⁄8 x 393⁄8 x 195⁄8 ins

20. 3 House Sparrows

carved and painted driftwood 23 x 39 x 19 cms 9 x 153⁄8 x 71⁄2 ins

21. Jays

carved and painted driftwood 34 x 33 x 35 cms 133⁄8 x 13 x 13 3⁄4 ins

22. Kestrel and Shrew

carved and painted driftwood 86 x 52 x 36 cms 337⁄8 x 20 1⁄2 x 141⁄8 ins

23. Kingfisher and Fish I

24. Kingfisher and Fish II

carved and painted driftwood 33 x 13 x 16 cms 12 3⁄4 x 51⁄8 x 61⁄4 ins

carved and painted driftwood 18 x 18 x 14 cms 7 1⁄8 x 7 1⁄8 x 5 1⁄2 ins

25. Lapwing

26. Linnets

carved and painted driftwood 20 x 14 x 16 cms 7 7⁄8 x 51⁄2 x 61⁄4 ins

carved and painted driftwood 59 x 47 x 47 cms 231⁄4 x 181⁄2 x 181⁄2 ins

27. Little Grebe

28. Long-tailed Tits

carved and painted driftwood 20 x 28 x 17 cms 7 5⁄8 x 11 x 63⁄4 ins

carved and painted driftwood 17 x 18 x 14 cms 61⁄2 x 7 1⁄8 x 51⁄2 ins

29. Mallard

carved and painted driftwood 21 x 41 x 18 cms 81⁄4 x 161⁄8 x 71⁄8 ins

30. Mistle Thrushes

carved and painted driftwood 27 x 26 x 32 cms 10 5⁄8 x 101⁄4 x 125⁄8 ins

31. Moorhen

carved and painted driftwood 22 x 31 x 14 cms 85⁄8 x 121⁄4 x 51⁄2 ins

32. Nightingales

carved and painted driftwood 21 x 15 x 19 cms 81⁄4 x 57⁄8 x 7 1⁄2 ins

33. Owl, 2 Wrens and Shrew – Panel

34. 6 Owls, 2 Shrews, 4 Worms – Panel

carved and painted driftwood 66 x 47 x 11 cms 26 x 181⁄2 x 43⁄8 ins

carved and painted driftwood 60 x 39 x 26 cms 235⁄8 x 15 3⁄8 x 10 ins

35. Pied Wagtails

36. Plover

carved and painted driftwood 37 x 15 x 23 cms 145⁄8 x 57⁄8 x 9 ins

carved and painted driftwood 22 x 20 x 21 cms 85⁄8 x 77⁄8 x 81⁄8 ins

37. Pochard I

38. Pochard II

carved and painted driftwood 31 x 41 x 21 cms 12 1⁄4 x 161⁄8 x 81⁄4 ins

carved and painted driftwood 24 x 36 x 22 cms 91⁄4 x 141⁄8 x 85⁄8 ins

39. Redstarts

40. Redwings

carved and painted driftwood 25 x 32 x 22 cms 97⁄8 x 12 5⁄8 x 85⁄8 ins

carved and painted driftwood 16 x 12 x 17 cms 61⁄8 x 43⁄4 x 61⁄2 ins

41. Ring Ouzels

carved and painted driftwood 30 x 44 x 15 cms 113⁄4 x 17 3⁄8 x 57⁄8 ins

42. Robin

carved and painted driftwood 56 x 18 x 19 cms 22 x 71⁄8 x 71⁄2 ins

43. Robins

carved and painted driftwood 19 x 19 x 19 cms 7 1⁄2 x 7 1⁄4 x 7 1⁄4 ins

44. Rooks

carved and painted driftwood 57 x 41 x 48 cms 221⁄4 x 161⁄8 x 187⁄8 ins

45. Sanderling

46. Six Sanderling

carved and painted driftwood 26 x 31 x 20 cms 10 x 12 1⁄4 x 7 7⁄8 ins

carved and painted driftwood 31 x 18 x 12 cms 121⁄4 x 67⁄8 x 41⁄2 ins

47. Shorebird

48. Shoveler

carved and painted driftwood 22 x 35 x 24 cms 81⁄2 x 13 3⁄4 x 91⁄4 ins

carved and painted driftwood 49 x 10 x 31 cms 191⁄4 x 33⁄4 x 121⁄4 ins

49. Song Thrushes

50. Starlings

carved and painted driftwood 33 x 36 x 19 cms 13 x 141⁄8 x 71⁄2 ins

carved and painted driftwood 24 x 26 x 24 cms 91⁄4 x 101⁄4 x 91⁄4 ins

51. Swifts and Young – Panel

52. Teal

carved and painted driftwood 17 x 24 x 16 cms 6 3⁄4 x 91⁄4 x 61⁄4 ins

carved and painted driftwood 51 x 50 x 15 cms 197⁄8 x 195⁄8 x 57⁄8 ins

53. Tufted Duck

54. Water Rail

carved and painted driftwood 21 x 31 x 13 cms 81⁄4 x 121⁄4 x 51⁄8 ins

carved and painted driftwood 26 x 31 x 22 cms 10 1⁄4 x 121⁄4 x 81⁄2 ins

55. Wheatears

56. Wrens

carved and painted driftwood 24 x 16 x 9 cms 91⁄2 x 6 1⁄4 x 31⁄2 ins

carved and painted driftwood 20 x 24 x 19 cms 77⁄8 x 91⁄4 x 71⁄2 ins

57. Wren and Worm

58. Wrens and Young – Panel

carved and painted driftwood 54 x 41 x 10 cms 211⁄4 x 161⁄8 x 37⁄8 ins

carved and painted driftwood 22 x 13 x 11 cms 81⁄2 x 51⁄8 x 43⁄8 ins

59. Wrens and Worm

60. Yellow Wagtails

carved and painted driftwood 25 x 18 x 18 cms 97⁄8 x 7 1⁄8 x 7 1⁄8 ins

carved and painted driftwood 20 x 30 x 12 cms 7 5⁄8 x 115⁄8 x 43⁄4 ins

CDIII

ISBN 978-1-908486-95-0 Publication No: CDIII Published by David Messum Fine Art Š David Messum Fine Art

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without the prior permission in writing from the publisher.

The Studio, Lords Wood, Marlow, Buckinghamshire.

Tel: 01628 486565 www.messums.com Photography: Steve Russell Printed by DLM-Creative

61. Barn Owl and Snake

carved and painted driftwood 88 x 34 x 39 cms 341⁄2 x 133⁄8 x 153⁄8 ins ISBN 978-1-908486-95-0

www.messums.com

9 781908 486950