Interview
Alan Todd
Upon graduation in 1972 from the Byam Shaw School of Art in London studying painting, Alan emigrated to Australia and has lived in Adelaide ever since.
He taught art for several years, but spent thirty years with contemporary dance. For the last ten years, he has been a director of his own company, Lift Dance Theatre, which explored similar themes to studio work. Each year, he created original full-length works to debut at the Adelaide Fringe Festival. He also lectured in filmmaking, wrote several novels, and has continued writing articles on art which are published weekly on his website
Alan returned to painting in the 90s after a hiatus in the 80s where he made large-scale works in welded steel. He continues to work in steel on a smaller scale but has significant recent work in wood.
He built the current studio, Vanilla Sky in the Adelaide Hills above a river valley seven years ago, after decades on the plains.
What is your background and how did you start your journey in the art world?
“Early in adolescence, I decided to be an artist and became part of the generation of British artists who arose in the late ’60s in London.
The Byam Shaw art school invited international students from every corner of the globe, bringing diverse approaches and styles. It was a cultural melting pot. This was a time when art teaching as such was being replaced by mentorship in the belief that art was more than just technique and, as such, unteachable.”
What inspires you?
“My art is autobiographical in the sense the works are driven by aspects of my life. I have consistently recognized an innate need to create and manipulate materials,triggered through considerations of a philosophical nature, rather than any need to make copies of the world. Many of the works, including all of the dance productions, are derived from considerations of humanity and civilization, born from extensive reading.
I’m especially interested in time, and how it links past and present. However, after more than seven decades, I still have much to consider.”
What themes do you pursue? Is there an underlying message in your work?
"I have been exploring two themes for some time now. While I chose to live in Australia, my upbringing was in the UK, where I was conscious of history and pre-history rooted in myth. The remnants of Neolithic culture are everywhere in the form of standing stones and circles — examples of human creativity aligned with understanding the broader implications of humankind’s place in the universe.
The Sentinel series of sculptures has its roots in my drawings from the early ’90s of destroyed jetties littering the coast of South Australia. Taking the idea of what remains of culture and linking it to my heritage, I have evolved a series of vertical wooden forms from industrial timber that suggest portals to the equinoxes. The equinoxes in ancient times marked two fixed points in a year for humankind, while the massive balks of wood in the Port River observe a moment in time that dates to the origins of South Australia. The surfaces of these works have relief shapes that suggest a forgotten language. In no sense are the sculptures imitations of the past. Instead, they aim at a timelessness that reflects the possibility that standing stones from four thousand years ago will outlast humankind.
The second theme, Conversations With My Father, came to a head with my father's death two years ago. It wasn't his death but the external interconnection of our lives that struck me forcibly. As someone who lived through the Great Depression and WW2 and went out to work as a fourteen-year-old, he said little about his life; typical of his generation. With me as the first in our family to go into tertiary education, our lives parted early on. And for me, consciously pursuing a life as an artist was always a concern to him. In some ways, the work produced after his death paid homage to his life. To that end, his workshop was full of scavenged wood and his belief that he could take apart and fix anything. Much of the wood that I chose to use for the sculpture series came from the building skips on the estate around me, where industrial wood was abandoned full of nails and saw cuts. I gave it another life.
I was also impacted by the premature death of my mother from symptoms of clinical depression. Half a world away, I could not make the journey, and her death, cremation, and ashes-scattering all occurred within a few days. I was not part of it. Later I recalled her isolation from the world in a series of sculptures entitled Enclosure.”
“The work that emerged before and after my father passed away has taken two and three-dimensional forms. The paintings are from moments in my life that should have been shared. The sculptures explored my relationship to aspects of our lives that were never addressed.”
How would you describe your work?
“My work is an exploration of ideas. The ideas always come first, and then I look for a medium to express them. While this doesn’t describe the work, it suggests a process of trying to understand the world and my place in it.
When asked, I often say I am a painter and sculptor. Still, the terms are too exclusive and indeterminate to be of much value when I regularly paint sculptures and use sculptural elements on a two-dimensional surface.”
Which artists influence you most?
“There is hardly an artist in history who has not shaped my thinking. However, as a product of the 20th century, the influences on my thinking and work are diverse.
Of the two significant strands of modernism—the romantic/surrealist and the analytic/constructivist—I favor the latter, but there is no dividing line. An idea is typically explored through several mediums, and intuition and materials handling play a part. Regarding specific artists in sculpture: Noguchi, Bourgeois, Nevelson, Greg Johns, Picasso, Gabo, David Smith, Brancusi, Li Ifan, Salcedo, Wilding, and Barlow.
As a painter, it is more difficult to pin down influences. The palette sometimes favors the coloration of a Fauve and, at other times, stark contrast and tonality. I also recognize the gestural abstraction of someone like Patrick Heron and other British abstractionists. However, between the two, I find Anselm Kiefer and any artist combining materials and approaches. I can recognize elements from the 20th century across Europe, Australia, America, and Asia.”
What is your creative process like?
“In many ways drawing is thinking for me. Drawing can be observational and analytical but it is the starting point for exploration through various mediums. A further essential element of this process is being able to explain the motivation and nuances of my thinking to myself.
In linking the idea or theme to the medium, I must continually examine the ongoing scope of work in its broadest context, and understand the whys and wherefores of the creative decisions. In describing the work, I always try to reach past the physical form and find common conceptual ground for a potential audience. This doesn’t mean working to an audience’s expectations, but finding links in common without explaining the work in simplistic terms. After all, an audience supplies 50% or more of the meaning of a work, depending upon how much it resonates with their own experiences.”
What is an artist’s role in society and how do you see that evolving?
“I have always seen my role as acting like a conduit. My work is personal and I make no apologies for that, but I want to hope that a connection can be made on both intellectual and visceral levels.
The nature of the art world has evolved this century, and so has the artist’s realm. There are no more movements; no more ground-breaking ideas to match Cubism, Fauvism, or land art. Increasingly, artists are being left to fend for themselves in a digital marketplace. The critical element of the art world continues to try and bracket artists around themes that can be social and political. Still, artists’ individuality is coming to the fore. All we can do as artists are support each other as a community.”
Have you had any noteworthy exhibitions you'd like to share?
“Each of the recent exhibitions evolved around a single idea. PHENOMENON, MYTH- MEMORY-METAMORPHOSIS, and ENCOUNTER took my interest in film and time as their starting point. Film is not reality in any sense, despite its outward appearance. It is a construct.
In drawing film storyboards, I was always conscious of that construction in that single-drawn frames had to contain specific information, and the written dialogue seldom had anything to do with the image. An example of this from cinema comes from Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, where two assassins in a car discuss the price of hamburgers while the landscape passes unnoticed, and their actual purpose isn’t mentioned at all.
The single frames I created in the painting were overlaid with text. They looked like an extended storyboard when arranged on a gallery wall, even though there was no logical narrative connection between them. The separation of image and sound interests me as fragments of a reality that we accept as normal but which in one sense makes no sense at all. The human concept of time derives from the distance between two events such as sunrise and sunset, but time is nevertheless, essentially indefinable.”
