Introduction : lan Naylor's Cosford Residency
I'd been looking for a p/t 'residency' for sometime; looking for at least an 'over six month' placement, yet not compromising my family responsibilities. I wanted to work without the constraints and relative 'shallow penetration' of small-scale commission work.
The Aerospace museum was ideal. It works in vast, industrial units. Its focus is visual, strong on engineering, innovation, technology, symbolism, and the organisation works hard to display, inform and educate. Its also has strong private sector contacts and is in considerable use as a conference venue.
On first sight it preserves the national collection of machines seeking almost Olympian ideals of faster, further, higher.
Looking deeper, it's also a museum of hard edged political 'big sticks', from carpet bombers to tactical nuclear weapons. It cares for machines built to support various empires, a competition of economics as well as bullets. It holds a maturing mechanical record of a period of European history moving from conflict to integration, and these machines played a big part in that process. They were built for the curious, the aggressive, the posturing, the suicidal, the desperate and the twice-a-year holidaymaker.
I believe the purpose, the violence and the politics of many of the exhibits may have been eclipsed by their undoubted visual strength. The shapes can be fantastic. The use of materials is exceptional; early bamboo and canvass, plywood in nuclear missiles. Polished, sculptured titanium reflecting multiple lights through impossibly vast roof spaces........I'm attracted to all of this and more. Instruments in foreign languages - faded squadron mottoes on overalls -veterans searching for the right colour flower on an Ohka (cherry blossom) suicide plane built to 'kill 'em' - a discussion of museum 'health and safety' regulations by men ordered in their youth to be a rear gunner and a bomb disposal specialist .... I want to work with some, or all of these issues. They can be immensely big and serious but I want to do it through observing the trivia, through simple drawing and painting; an old gunner's right hand - symbols, instruments & instructions - exploring linear perspective of enclosed tight environments within huge buildings.
Sponsors:
RAF Museum, West Midlands Arts
