Popova’s Column is a wall drawing that remakes Lyubov Popova’s 1923 watercolour Textile Design enlarged to the height of a found wall (2.7m), using red and blue yarn held in place by black tacks to outline the design’s solid red and blue watercolour diagonals.  Popova’s design stands as a work on its own, but is also the early stage of a process that is able to be translated into a realised or fuller form – just as drawings can become paintings or buildings, and notation can be realised in performed music or dance. Popova made this design to be printed onto cotton fabric at the Ivanovo textile factory near Moscow, where she worked as a designer with other Constructivist/Productivist artists (before her untimely death from scarlet fever in 1924). She saw purpose in her artwork being worn by peasants and workers as they went about their lives.

In adapting the core of her 1923 Textile Design as a vertical column on a wall, I am experimenting with translating her design into another realised form. While Popova’s plan was to integrate the design into everyday life via clothing worn by working people, Popova’s Column scales up the design to fit walls of buildings that people also inhabit. These different plans have things in common—people and the clothing and buildings they inhabit are both occupants and indicators of actual space, which is not usually included in mainstream artforms, then or now. And it is the presence and value of place that I have long liked to work with.

I have also been collaborating across generations in this way for over a decade, remaking and adapting artworks by artists of the same generation as Popova, including Katarzyna Kobro and Sophie Taeuber, who were working at a time when artists were experimenting in varied ways with spatially inventive forms. Their work recognises that content is inherent in the form or medium, an insight later encapsulated in media theorist Marshall McLuhan’s phrase ‘the medium is the message’.(1) Kobro, for example, considered both the physical space and metal shapes of her sculptures as materials in her work, valuing them equally(2). Taeuber didn’t write or speak about her work like Kobro did, but I see her paintings acknowledging the physical space needed for bodily movement—she includes in them the apparently abstract shapes of the dance labanotation system she worked with when studying dance with Rudolf Laban in her youth.

The important ‘message’ I see in the mediums used by Kobro and Taeuber is that the physical space/place in which a work is located has value as one of the components that together generate the work’s meaning. This enables the artwork to model for visitors the value of their own locations (just as the exclusion of physical space from mainstream artforms models the opposite). This is one way art can contribute to the environmental movement—by working to counter the devaluation of place that underlies the human behaviour that is leading to climate breakdown and that has been identified as a characteristic and consequence of modernity. (3) Modelling does this through the ‘massaging’ process that McLuhan implied through his famous phrase, ‘The Medium is the Massage (4)’ .

Thus, as well as collaborating with earlier artists via their artwork, I also collaborate with the places in which artworks are located, by making artworks that enable their location to generate content. Initially this was to see what would happen when pictorial and actual spaces are overlaid or in close proximity to each other. Later it was also to explore the energy created when these spaces do not easily resolve themselves in our modern ‘spacist’ mindset. I came to see that one message in the medium of that collaboration is the value of place, propagated by artwork that includes place as a component, or that valued place sufficiently to partner with it, as we should also do in protecting the physical world we live in.

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images: Silversalt Photography