The Observer
25.08.19 37RIGHT
The 15th-century
St Clement’s
church in West
Thurrock,
‘framed by the
belching shadow
of a Procter &
Gamble soap
factory’.Photograph by
Tony Watson/
AlamyRIGHT
‘The East End of
London emptied
into Essex
after the war’:
Britain’s fi rst
residential tower
block, the 1951
Lawn in Harlow,
designed
by Frederick
Gibberd.
Photograph by
Martin Bond/
Alamy
in 1992 , it still pops up in televis ion
dramas that require a menacing
subterranean locale.
Existential dread casts a
particularly deep and baleful
shadow over Essex. Catastrophic
fl ooding in 1953 killed 114 people
in Jaywick and Canvey Island , with
32,000 evacuated. The “thieving
sea” still nibbles ominously at a
350- mile coastline that weaves its
implausibly intricate way along
innumerable estuaries and inlets.
Since the Romans tussled with
Boudic ca, Essex has also been in
the front line of foreign invasion,
and its coast and countryside are
studded with concrete pillboxes and
other decaying detritus of defence,
such as Maunsell sea forts in the
Thames estuary. Originally designed
to house anti-aircraft guns, their
carious hulks now make for
especially salacious ruin porn.
During the second world war,
Audley End , historically the nearest
thing to a palace Essex could
muster, was requisitioned as a
covert training college for Polish
saboteurs, its 17th-century interiors
temporarily encased in a protective
skin of plywood. After the war, it
was suggested this Saffron Walden
fastness might become the offi cial
residence of the disgraced Duke
and Duchess of Windsor, but they
quickly found quarters more to
their liking in Paris. The less palatialSimon Starling
The artist Simon Starling, who
won the Turner prize in 2005 for
Shedboatshed – for which he turned
a wooden shed into a boat and
sailed it down the Rhine before
reassembling it as a shed in a Swiss
gallery – was born in Epsom, Surrey
in 1967. He studied at Maidstone
College of Art and later attended
the Glasgow School of Art. His sixth
solo exhibition, A-A’, B-B’ , takes
place between the Modern Institute
in Glasgow (7 Sept-26 Oct) and
the Galleria Franco Noero in Turin
(15 Oct-11 Jan). Starling lives and
works in Copenhagen.A-A’, B-B’ is a work of divisions and
connections across time and space.
What was the spark for it?
Coming across a fragment of a
Tiepolo painting, Halbardier in a
Landscape , in the Agnelli collection
in Turin about 10 years ago. Much
more recently I learned how, in the
early 19th century, it was cut from a
larger painting called The Finding of
Moses , which is now in the Scottish
National Gallery. I guess, because
of what’s happening in Britain with
Brexit, it seemed like an irresistible
moment to make an exhibition
about a divided painting.Th e work also features a divided car...
I quite enjoy taking the logic from
one situation and transposing it
on to another. What I’ve done is
take a blue Fiat 125 , which was the
type of car that [former Fiat boss]
Giovanni Agnelli , the owner of the
Halbardier painting, drove around
Turin in the 1970s and 80s. That car
has been cut into two pieces, in the
same proportion as the painting was
cut, and the smaller part of the car
will go with the larger part of the
painting in Turin and vice versa. So
it’s a collapse of these two stories.You have a long-running interest in the
deconstruction and transformation of
objects. What’s at the root of that?
I had a father who didn’t like to
pay anybody to do something if
he thought he could do himself. I
was always surrounded by tools,
and a DIY culture, which was
completely liberating for me, to be
able to go into his little workshop
and build something or try to make
something fl y. That mentality has
always been part of the way I think
as an artist.Have you ever had to abandon a piece
midway through because it becomes
too diffi cult to execute?
What happens is that things morph
into something else, rather than me
abandoning them. One nice example
was a project I made called Island
for Weeds, which ended up being
shown in the Scottish pavilion at
the [2003] Venice Biennale. It was
originally supposed to be a fl oating
island to support a little colony of
rhododendrons on Loch Lomond, in
the new national park.
The proposal was accepted, but
as we were going into production,
one of the supporters of the
project, Scottish National Heritage,
suddenly got cold feet – they were
worried my project supporting
this invasive species was going to
backfi re on them – and pulled the
plug. But in Venice, this homeless
island in a pavilion overlooking
the Grand Canal , with unwanted
rhododendrons blooming on the
top, had a beautiful new drama to it.Do have any interest in the digital
world? I can’t fi nd you on social media,
for example.
No, I’ve stayed away from that to
a large degree. I feel like my days
are so full of other things that the
idea of fi nding the time to look
at Instagram feels exhausting to
me. I’ve been working with early
computer technologies – Jacquard
weaving and the punch card and
Babbage. For me, that’s where
digital technology is interesting- at its beginnings, when you can
put your hands on it and kind of
understand it, as opposed to now,
when I have no idea what goes on in
my mobile phone.
How did winning the Turner prize
impact on your life?
If I go pretty much anywhere in the
world to do a lecture, or whatever,
people turn up now. It’s a hugely
potent byline, internationally.
Because, you know, I don’t make
the work for myself: it’s nice to have
people look at it [laughs].What do you get up to for fun?
Mostly cooking and playing tennis.
I just found a wonderful Mexican
writer, Álvaro Enrigue, who wrote
a book [ Sudden Death ] about
Caravaggio and tennis, and it really
felt like a book that was written for
me. Two passions rolled into one.
Interview by Killian Fox‘It seemed like
an irresistible
moment to make
a show about a
divided painting’
Q&A
ANDREA GUERMANIand newly constructed Butlin’s
holiday camp at Clacton was also
requisitioned as an internment
camp for German civilians, while
Warner’s at Dovercourt became
a reception centre for Jewish
children fl eeing the Nazis following
Kristallnacht.
As the East End of London
emptied into Essex after the war, its
countryside became an energetic
incubator of new towns, with
their blissful compensations of
light, air and indoor sanitation.
Basildon, home of “Basildon man”,
the cynosure of the Tory working-
class voter, was masterplanned
by Basil Spence, while in Harlow,
Frederick Gibberd designed Britain’s
fi rst residential tower block, the
10-storey Lawn. More radically,
the development of Essex’s new
towns went hand in hand with a
new “plate glass” university on the
edge of Colchester. Kenneth Capon
of Architects’ Co-Partnership was
reportedly keen to disrupt the staid
notion of a campus, insisting on
“a certain amount of controlled
vulgarity”. He described his
intention behind the architecture as
“to do something fi erce”, a wish that
was unintentionally fulfi lled when
its brutalist precincts became a
crucible for vigorous student protest
in the late 60s.
Darley’s own odyssey concludes
on a more conciliatory note, with
a visit to the House for Essex , “a
cottage for Rapunzel illustrated
by Arthur Rackham”, designed by
the architect Charles Holland and
artist Grayson Perry, both Essex
boys. Like Darley’s book, it is a love
letter to the county, but framed
through the prism of an Essex
Everywoman, the fi ctional Julie
Cope. Set in Wrabness , a pinprick
hamlet on the northernmost
extremity of Essex, the bijou
micro-dwelling is an expressively
confected tapestry of allusion,
craft and storytelling that fi nds
echoes in Darley’s vivid narrative
of reclaiming and resituating.
Contradictory and complex, Essex
is never quite what i t seems.To order Excellent Essex by Gillian
Darley (Old Street Publishing, £14.99)
for £13.19, go to guardianbookshop.
com or call 0330 333 6846