Holding the Earth this Way       (2022)

Holding the Earth this Way       (2022)

‘Kent peg tiles’ (fired clay) on traditional timber roofing frame, lead flashing, mortar
Salvaged plank from the hull of the Westmoreland, (built 1900), Kent’s last Thames brick barge.
8m x 2.5m x 1m

Tiling by Karl Terry Roofing, Kent
Tiles made by Spicer Tiles, New Romney, Kent
Timber frame by Oak Framer, Kent

Permanent sculpture, installed in the courtyard of The Amelia Scott building, Tunbridge Wells, Kent
Commissioned by The Amelia.

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Holding the Earth this Way is a permanent public sculptural commission (installed in the courtyard of, The Amelia Scott building, housing a public museum, library and well-being services in Tunbridge Wells, Kent).  It is based on a series of traces and flows; the empathic affect of a hand gesture captured in a photographic portrait, a fold of earth fired in a kiln, the passage of time in an hour glass, and traditional techniques of building (a roof) shelter. Its form suggests an abstracted body, an aberration, performing a ghost-like melding into, or emerging from, the building it adheres to, whilst also alluding to other local vernacular shapes; the oast house, a boat’s hull and bunting.
It is a sculpture literally and figuratively embedded in its place. Tunbridge Wells and its surrounding area has a rich history of brick and tile making using the heavy Wealden clay its communities stood on.
Amelia Scott (1860-1952) was a British social reformer and campaigner for women’s suffrage and one of the first two women elected as Tunbridge Wells councillors. She was an official of Tunbridge Wells’ non-militant women’s suffrage society. The one existing photographic portrait of her contains a detail (the photograph’s punctum) which, inadvertently, draws the viewer’s attention away from her face and downwards to the base of the picture. Here one hand lightly holds a pale glove, the brightest element within the image, as she, inadvertently makes its outline triangular. Perceiving this apparently insignificant event as her signal across time to the present Chodzko read Amelia Scott’s gesture as a declaration of a female folding, inverting, or overturning existing hierarchical patriarchal systems through ‘soft power’.  It is perhaps a suggestion to develop a new form of care, a guidance: what if we try Holding the Earth this Way?
The sculpture’s exterior is created from around one thousand hand-made Kent peg tiles. A thousand tiles is the approximate daily physical limit for one person; one day’s labour. The hour glass’s form contains the motif of a trickle of accumulating sand in the lower ‘cone’ through a pattern of curved edged ‘club tiles’ in relation to rectangular ‘kent pegs’. Time is passing. Time is precious!  History, change, transformation, growth!
The internal structure of timber battens that the tiles are hung on inside the cone resembles a network of wood – the oak tree symbol of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies.  The NUWSS oak equates the branches and leaves with people involved in the organisation.  Here the tiles represent the people; tiles made from clay, the earth. Many of the tiles used in Holding the Earth this Way include the impressed finger marks of their maker. We speak of the human as coming from the earth and at death, returning to the earth. Many creation myths show the first humans ‘born’ from a lump of clay.  Further references to the hand can be seen in the lead flashing girdling the middle of the sculpture, at the join between the upper triangle and lower cone top, with its five scallops as ‘fingers’.  The tiling process itself is highly skilled and reliant on accumulating years of careful haptic knowledge.
The clay mixture for the tiles incorporated water collected by Chodzko from the River Teise, in Tunbridge Wells, as if place was an important ingredient within the magic spell of this artwork.  At the base of the cone (a shape also suggestive of a generic witches’ hat) is a soffit which includes a pair of holes (as ‘eyes’ in a shadowy cartoon face, looking down to the earth). If we look up, through these ‘eyes’, a salvaged plank from the hull of the Westmoreland (built 1900 and recently broken up in Lower Halstow, Kent’s last Thames brick barge), is visible. The holes reveal this hull plank’s outside and its inner side (coated in horse hair and bitumen) as though it too is somehow flowing and folded, forming a vessel, suspended inside this chamber.  Chodzko’s ongoing interest in the unconscious, hauntings, dream states and places beyond perception as explored in this enclosed, hidden, private, ‘surplus’ space of the cone can also be seen in eg; April – May 2000 Arc Ark (2010), Ark-Eye from Great Expectations (2015), and Ghost .  The imagining of bodies and buildings merging together in order to catalyse change appears in works such as Secretors  (1993 – ), Hole (2007), and Because… (2013).  The artwork as site of empathic connection with another person, (in the past, imagining a particular moment of their psychological reflection), also occurs in works such as Reunion; Salò (1998), Because… (2013), and a way from heaven   (2017-2022) and O, you happy roots, branch and mediatrix (2020).  Other permanent site-specific sculptural works by Chodzko creating a mythology of place include Five holes from a Removed Sign  (2007) (as part of Hole (2007)),  Pyramid  (2008) and a way from heaven   (2017-2022).
Along with many of his previous works Chodzko suggests that part of the consideration of Holding the Earth this Way is directed towards its speculative future.  Having noticed an accidental ‘landscape painting’ created (through the build up of lichens, mosses, soot and other pollution stains) on a 200 year old kent peg tile taken from a roof in Smarden, Kent, his sculpture in Tunbridge Wells partly imagines its decommissioned dismantling in the distant future, revealing 1000 individual images of landscapes, ‘grown’ through local natural and unnatural environmental processes.  The idea of mud or earth containing knowledge, a guidance towards a future transformation is also explored in, for example, cell-a  (2002), Settlement  (2004), Sowmat   (2007), and  A Hostile Environment  (2019).

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Tiling by Karl Terry Roofing, Kent.  (Andy Batt, Bob Smith and Bradley Sercome)
Tiles made by Spicer Tiles, New Romney, Kent
Timber frame by Oak Framer, Kent