Light and Knowledge, Sketches and Sculpture - a visit to the studio of Nigel Hall RA

Light and Knowledge, Sketches and Sculpture - a visit to the studio of Nigel Hall RA

23 August, 2011
by: Tom Jeffreys

Tom Jeffreys pays a visit to the studio of Nigel Hall ahead of the artist's solo show at the Royal Academy.

Bright shapes of summer sun impress themselves on huge, crisp, white walls, gently turn as hours pass, and wend their way across the floor, pausing periodically to dance upon pairs of looping, intertwining forms. Inside this vast space, pairs of wall-mounted ellipses intersect, and the floor is dominated by a wooden structure reminiscent of overlapping petals. Drawings, open notebooks and small-scale sculptural works cover every available surface.

Along with a couple of other journalists, I'm inside a converted church hall in Balham, for twenty-odd years the studio of contemporary artist Nigel Hall. It really is a beautiful building, sensitively converted over the years by Hall to include an office/meeting area inside a rather nifty glass box, a workshop packed with wood shavings and arcane tools, and large airy space, full of light and Hall's signature organic-looking abstract sculptures.

There's something strange I always think about visiting an artist's studio – something akin, perhaps, to reading someone else's diary. The studio, generally, is the artist's place for experimentation away from the public eye – the space where thoughts can be explored without fear of criticism. And yet the mere fact that a group of journalists are here in Hall's studio (and that it looks very much like somewhere he's used to having visitors) implies that this opposition between private and public is a little more complex than one might think.

The comparison with a diary though is apt. This autumn, Hall is taking part in the Artist's Laboratory series at the Royal Academy, the concept behind which is to allow a Royal Academician the time and the space to exhibit work that diverges from their usual practice. In this case, Hall – best known for the geometric abstract sculptures dotted around his studio – is exhibiting over 100 drawings and sketches of landscapes from across the world. These works, most of which have never been show before in public, are frequently referred to by Hall over the course of the morning as his own form of personal diary.

From the Mojave desert outside LA that Hall visited shortly after art school, via the branches strewn across Hyde Park following the storms of 1987, to the Engadine Valley in Switzerland to which Hall returns frequently, and even a series of manhole covers from across the world, everything is documented in the reams of notebooks and sketchpads that fill several shelves by the front door. And just as diaries are, secretly, always written to be read (even if it's just by the author, two minutes later) so revisiting these sketches has proved a fruitful experience for the artist.

Previously he'd regarded them as a “distinct part” of his creative output – as at first they seem, in comparison to the sleek, finished forms for which he's best known. But, now they've been sorted out, Hall says, the links between these two apparently disparate halves of his oeuvre have become clearer, “although,” he adds, “not in any obvious sense”.

What this means is that whilst these drawings – sparse, minimal, but clearly quickly produced and in Hall's words, “fairly straightforward” – provide new insight into Hall's way of thinking and seeing, they are not be used as some kind of simple prism through which to interpret the abstracts. Rather, both areas of production overlap and intersect – rather like Hall's elliptical sculptures in fact. Both drawing and sculpture, figuration and abstraction, explore the relationship between man and the environment – the rhythms of the landscape, the way one moves within it, and the way it apparently moves around us as we do so.

As Hall himself puts it: “the landscape draws you to things you've made as an artist, and then pushes you in other directions”. The things Hall has made as an artist – both sculpture and the drawings on show at the Royal Academy – concern moments and movement, contemplation, examination and expression – both 'private' documentation and public affirmation. They concern both the structures we see in the environment and the very acts of looking through which we see them; the relationship, in short, between vision and interpretation, sight and knowledge. As the panes of light float assuredly across the studio, the rhythms of Hall's works – his looking and his thinking – gradually, delicately, begin to emerge.


Artists' Laboratory 03 - Nigel Hall is at the Royal Academy from 7th September to 23rd October 2011.

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Tom Jeffreys