Output details

Enclosure with Ladders for One Thousand Smashed Cultural Artefacts (Enclosure with Ladders). A site-specific sculpture, (Qing’s red bricks, ceramic, paint, 8m x 8m x 2.25m.), made for the exhibition Redefining Old Architectural Ceramics, Clayarch Gimhae Museum, South Korea, August 8th 2008 to August 2nd 2009. The exhibition comprised works by ten international artists, all specialising in ceramic sculpture, whom the Museum invited to ‘redefine’ architectural ceramics through working with a large quantity of bricks, some dating back to the 17th century, which had been procured from demolition sites in China.

The project offered a new context for Burton to extend research into the use of brick in architectural ceramic sculpture, focussing on how sculpture can attain resonance and meaning through the reuse of salvaged materials, and on the relationship between interior and exterior spaces in large-scale ceramic work. The project represented one iteration in a series of large-scale brick sculptures developed first in India: ‘Skyqutb’, (Sanskriti Foundation, Delhi 2006) and, subsequent to this project, in ‘Jug II (Shanghai World Expo, 2010), ‘Pen’ (S’Imbriquer, les Autours de la Brique, Beauvais, 2011) and ‘Buttress’ (Waterloo and Kitchener Art Gallery, Ontario, 2011)

Where in earlier works, Burton worked with miniature hand-made bricks, allowing the gradual accretion of a patina of paint and cement on the surface of the bricks to evidence their repeated use in different sculptures, ‘Enclosure with Ladders’ explored a similar problem but used ‘real’ full-scale bricks that were, through their history, invested with a problematic legacy - the destruction of historic architecture in China to free up space for new urban development. To point up this legacy, Burton drew on ‘shared’ social memories by inviting museum staff and visitors to recount their reaction to the notorious recent vandalism of one of Korea’s most important historic buildings, the Sungnyemun in Seoul. These accounts were transcribed and stencilled onto the bricks which could be seen as ‘victims’ of parallel acts of destruction.

The work explored the treatment of internal and external surfaces and spaces in large-scale ceramic sculpture, e.g. establishing a contrast between a ‘defensive’-looking exterior and a more intimate interior space. After the year-long exhibition, the bricks forming Enclosure with Ladders were reused to create a new work.

The exhibition, curated by Prof. Sangho Shin (Seoul National University), was accompanied by a catalogue and was featured in the Korean media.