One of the primary tasks in Dunhill and O’Brien’s collaborative practice has been to work out how to make sculpture unhampered by the burden of taste or the ‘hand of the artist’. This quest has led them to devise elaborate strategies and processes involving elements of chance, remote control and at times the involvement of groups of participants.
Their work is clearly concerned with questions of authorship, veracity, ‘craftsmanship’ and the status of sculpture but it also reflects upon the nature of human endeavour, aspiration and futility.

SCULPTURE

Sculpture and its peculiar and problematic status is a central concern of their practice. Sculpture is physically in the world but devoid of function and usually intended to be in some other ‘not in, or of, the world’ place. When on show, sculpture is always posing, whether it is displayed in an elaborate vitrine, casually shown or discreetly secreted. When sculpture is ‘off duty’, wrapped up and stored away out of sight, it takes on other interesting forms and offers a new set of problems. Dunhill and O’Brien believe that sculpture is unique in its potential awkwardness as an art form and this has always greatly endeared them to it.

PROCESS

The processes they employ often have ritualised and performative elements that may refer both to Zen Buddhist art practices (repetition used to overcome the ego) and to the idea of labour and penance (protestant work ethic) as necessary characteristics in the making of sculpture. In their practice the process is usually documented and, along with the ‘home made tools’ employed to make the work, may be (somewhat problematically) given the same status as the sculpture or product of the labour.

MOUNTAINS

The processes they employ have often resulted in Mountain like forms – perhaps a manifestation of a ‘sculptural’ yearning rather like the mountain that keeps being modelled in different materials (mashed potato, furniture etc) by various individuals in Steven Spielberg’s film Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

HOLES

Kurt Tucholsky (journalist, satirist and song text writer) once wrote ‘a hole is always a good thing’, and ‘the strangest thing about a hole is its edge. It’s still part of the Something but constantly overlooks the Nothing – a border guard of matter’.
Dunhill and O’Brien have been reflecting on holes in general and holes in sculpture in particular for some years now and this has resulted in a lecture on holes in sculpture; the artwork, Sculptomatic, that involves 500 images of sculptures with holes in; and more recently a portrait of an ancient bell casting hole in Tuscania, Italy.