Daniel Silver populates Frith Street gallery with ten sculptural figures that place bronze heads atop blocks of marble. Ranged around like totems, the individual presences are – in the gallery’s words – a celebration of their own materiality and reflect on what it is to be human and in the world, both physically and psychologically. The show is titled ‘Uncanny Valley’, and I started by asking about that…
PCK: You reference the Johnny Flynn & Robert Macfarlane song ‘We All Get Lost in the Uncanny Valley’, and you’ve previously taken a close interest in Freud, who identified the uncanny as a feeling of dread that arises when something familiar appears as alien. What is uncanny for you here?
DS: While working, I was listening to the Flynn / Macfarlane album The Moon Also Rises. Robert Macfarlane wrote a book, Underland, 2019, about spending time under the ground and how it’s different. That reminded me that when I studied at the Slade in the 90’s with Phyllida Barlow, she spoke about how you don’t have to see sculpture with your eyes, you can experience it through your body… I remember her talking about workmen looking up out of a big hole in the ground and Phyllida talking to them about how it felt to be standing there. I was thinking about that and marble, not only in terms of sculpture but as a material that is part of the fabric of this world. I tapped into the marble in that way and put the head on top to bring it all together. I want the viewer to experience this work in the realm of sculpture and at the same time as a material that carries the history of the world in it. And that fits how, over ten years ago with Art Angel, I tapped into Freud’s uncanny – how you look at things and let them resonate with you and take you into a deep walk-through.
What is the particular attraction of marble for you?
I never used marble at art school, I used materials you could get from a DIY shop or buy in a skip. My relationship with marble started from going to Italy to buy broken sculptures from an old family stone yard in Pietrasanta – such as an angel with one wing… They’ve been making sculptures there for over a hundred years, and there’s a whole industry of selling what remains. I was buying and reworking them as found objects, not as a professional stone carver, but in a very ad hoc way. I have to listen to the marble as I tap into it because I don’t carve a known drawing; I just carve directly, speaking to the material, and I want the viewer to do the same. Through that, I started to become interested in this particular material and its history.
That brings together several timescales?
The material is millions of years old. Robert Macfarlane talks about how ‘we were once marble’ – the calcium in marble is very much like the calcium in our bones. You’ve got someone taking it off the mountain, and a 2,500 year history of using marble. And then its time in the yard. I don’t go to the quarry, I buy it from the yard where it’s been lying outside for a hundred years. We don’t know why it’s been discarded, sometimes you can see chiselling marks. Things have their own different stories, so we can tap into Macfarlane’s history of the world, into the art of the Renaissance, and into contemporary art as we know it.
Looking at, for example, ‘You’, I see a strong contrast between the surface of the marble left as you found it after a hundred years lying outside, and the surface on which you have worked?
I want the viewer to have a relationship that extends beyond one glance, you have to walk around and think about how it was formed. I’m trying to allow different stages of looking, so you see the material as it’s aged, you walk around and see someone has carved it, and that can look very like a landscape, the internal landscape that we all carry with us. When making my interventions, I’m aware of Michelangelo’s slaves. How do you question: Are they finished, or are they not? Are they coming out of the stone, are they in there?
Are the marble sections the plinths for the bronze heads?
You can say that the marble is the body. Going back to my time at the Slade, the plinth was a no-no for Anthony Caro, Richard Deacon, Phyllida Barlow… I treat it differently: the plinth is a body. And using the marble as a body informs the bronze head on top, as it has the context of the material, the history of the material, the form and the texture. It gives a really rich sense of information and reality to the head.
What about the steel plate under most of the works?
That is more practical: that is there as a structural point of connection to keep the sculpture stable.
Each sculpture embodies an action. Might they also guide the viewer?
Yes… There’s a play between different kinds of action… I want you to be listening, kissing, flying, to be you, to be me, to be alert, to be switched on, to connect to the space. Sometimes, I go with the kids for a walk in Epping Forest, and once you’re in there, you’re in a different space altogether, and I’m interested in that. Listening to the trees, we can say ‘yes, maybe they communicate under the ground to help each other out’ – there’s a different world out there, and if you turn yourself on you can listen to it, you can whistle with it.
I understand the figures to be imaginary, not portraits. So how do ‘Looking (Twin One)’ and ‘Being (Twin Two)’ relate to your nine-year-old identical twin daughters?
They don’t look like them at all… Well, maybe the backs have some similarities, and you can tell a lot about someone by looking at their backs – our posture and shape says a lot about us. But they come from one marble block cut in the middle. I didn’t think when I was making them, ‘I’m making twins’, but when they were finished, I saw them as real twin moments of looking and being.
Top Photo: Daniel Silver at work Courtesy The Artist and Firth Street Gallery
All Photos: Ben Westoby
Daniel Silver: ‘Uncanny Valley’ is at Frith Street Gallery until 18 January