Coca Bossanova
Sometimes I choose materials because they not only trigger echoes of visual meaning, but also audible ones. At infant school, an early encounter between sounds and objects shaped a series of sculptures I made many years later. Every Friday afternoon, Mrs Constable, my teacher, would read poems to the class accompanied by an orchestra of charming homemade sound effects such as shaken tins of dried peas (tropical downpour); hand wobbled sheets of tin (thunder rolls); fired staple guns (gunshot!) and scrunched up newspaper (walking through tall grass). To evoke the thunderous canter of an approaching horse we would furiously clap together two coconut shells. My favourite poem from this time was ‘The Highwayman’ which went like this:
A highwayman comes riding, riding, riding,
A highwayman comes riding, up to the old inn-door.
Over the cobbles he clatters and clangs in the dark inn-yard.
Tlot-tlot; tlot-tlot! Had they heard it? The horse hooves ringing clear;
Tlot-tlot; tlot-tlot, in the distance? Were they deaf that they did not hear?
And so for me this husky, noisy natural creation from faraway lands was ever associated with prancing ponies and galloping geldings – in other words – rich in association and vivid imagery.
The Coca Bossanova project came to me one day in my Islington studio. I was listening to David Bowie’s Sound and Vision and asked myself a question: ‘Would it be possible to evoke the audible (galloping horses) through the visual (coconuts)?’ By merging material with form could I build a coconut horse that dances and prances to its own clippity-cloppity tune?
I started tentatively. The first horse, would be in a ‘lying down’ position, because at this early stage, a standing up horse made from coconuts was way too much to cope with! I made the armature from scrap wood onto which I attached hundreds of coconut shells using screws – building up the taught muscles slowly with the round forms. It seemed a little miracle that every part of the coconut lent itself perfectly to the equine form. Up turned coconuts made for perfect hooves, inverted coconuts – eye sockets, while the coconut hair became the mane and tail.
Over the course of two years I toiled, eventually making five life size coconut horses – each one more ambitious than the one before. By the time I made the final two horses they were not only standing, they were actually dancing – heads up, manes flowing, arms embraced, lost in rhythm.
I first exhibited them in my London squat in Islington. It had an abandoned factory attached to it which I turned into a makeshift gallery with my artist friends. I couldn’t afford film for my camera at the time, so I only have two not very good photographs to record the event. Like all of my sculptures from that time, I slowly disassembled them- raiding them for screws and wood for new sculptures. Every now and again I come across a stray husk from way back when.
