Interview with artist, writer, and mentor; Graham Keddie. MRSS. Member of the Royal Society of Sculptors.

Changing Times: I remember the nursery rhyme; ‘Hickere, dickere, dock, the mouse ran up the clock: The clock struck one, Down the mouse ran, Hickere, dickere, dock’. The earliest published version appeared in Tommy Thumb’s Pretty Song Book, (1744). Thought to have been based on the astronomical clock at Exeter Cathedral. Also, as counting rhyme used by shepherds.  Others suggest it plays on the demise of Richard Cromwell, who as Lord Protector of Great Britain, took over from his father, Oliver Cromwell, but survived in office for only one year. 

Time: does it flow like a river, tick with an atomic heartbeat coming from the centre of the universe, exist only in our mind’s memories of events, places, objects, repeat in cycles; dawn to dusk, season to season looking as we look for patterns with which to perceive the future? How often do we say, we can’t turn the clock back; it’s time to move on; the time has arrived; it’s time we learnt from history; it’s time for a change.

In Rosalind’s studio at the water tower, where she now lives and works, she presented me with a wall-hung sculpture, the title of which is ‘Changing Times’, for discussion.

The dimensions: for the wheel 61cm diameter x 15cm depth with an overall height of 120cm including the flax.  

How did this work come about? 
I have lived the water tower for 30 years, after converting this redundant building into a home, art gallery and studio. During this time, I kept the water wheel partly as an object I found aesthetically pleasing but also as a trophy to the building’s past.  I had it mounted on the front of my previous studio and, for a while, it was used as a nesting box by a family of Wrens. 

But I think I have always wanted to make use of it in an artwork in some way. I had always been interested in Eva Hesse’s use material combinations; paper pulp, glue, sawdust etc and in Robert Rausschenberg’s use of discarded objects. 

What is the background to this piece of work? 
I have always been interested in the heritage of the building, its former function, its relationship to the local area, its place in time. In parallel to this research, I have been developing my ‘soil to soil’, or ‘field to studio’, working practice.  

Can you expand on this? 
As part of my wider concerns for climate change, shortages of food, water supply, the health of the soil and our reliance on imports, I felt the need to examine my own place in time within all of this.  

For example, while it lasted, the water tower extracted water from a ground source. This was filtered with the use of the wheel via a labyrinth of channels beneath the building before being pumped up the tower and gravity fed to Fermyn Woods Hall and other locations in the community, contributing to the local economy.  

Plus, since I have been living here, I have sourced virtually all my materials from this location. This has meant a small flock of alpacas and using their fleece for processing into yarn and wool, as an art material. This then expanded into growing crops for dying, colouring, making and food production.  

The more I investigated the building’s past, the history of this local economy and the wider region of Northamptonshire, I found the production of flax had been produced here for about 10,000 years, up until 1952. I could see how effective this ‘soil to soil’; cycle had been: local farmers growing this crop for local people providing food, clothing, employment and importantly, supporting and feeding back into the local economy.   

I started growing flax because of this and my constant interest in finding new materials I could experiment with in my art.    

What was your practical starting point for this work? 
After a long day in the studio, late in the evening (I always keep a notebook beside my bed) it suddenly came to me. I wanted to use my flax in combination with the wheel in some way.  

Why the wheel and the flax? 
I loved the fact that the wheel carried the marks of time: the tonal range of colours, the tactile surface and the strong geometric symmetry. Also, I had just finished processing, some of my organic flax into long fibres. In this phase of flax processing the long fibres are soft; the feel of them is rather like horse’s tail or human hair. The colour of the flax is rich with earth tones, and the two combined emphasised to me something of the soil.  

I experimented with of course how, where and how much flax to use, using hemp to help position it. 

Why did you feel this was the right action to take? 
Well, when I’m experimenting with my work, I never can tell whether I have made the right decisions taken the right actions until a piece finally seems to feel intuitively right and ‘speaks’ to me.  

Recently, in other work, I have been using contemporary construction waste materials from the building of my studio in which we are now sitting, in a series called ‘Ian’s Waste’. This has led me down different pathways in terms of material investigation and experimentation.  

However, this piece seems to me to combine the soil, the water, time, age, a sense of tribal locality then and now. 

What do I think? 
This is the kind of work which confronts the viewer. It exudes atmosphere. The wheel seems to stare at me like an old silent clock face. The flax is like the remains of the long-dead field workers; you can almost hear their voices, their singing and their conversations.  

There is an element of Anselem Kiefer about it. This is to say, the combinations of materials feeds directly into the meaning and soul of the work. It is quite beautiful whilst, at the same time, brutal. It is full of resonance and contains a warning from the past, pointing to concerns for both the present and future.