The Sunken Courtyard - Hackney

Extract from STILLS FROM SCULPTURE

As a result of completing Slate Frieze and Island I became interested in the composition of large scale paintings installed in architectural space and travelled to Italy to look at frescoes. I was intrigued by the way the perspective in Uccello's Flood was altered by viewing it in real perspective in its raised situation in the space and by the complexities of composition in Piero's series of frescoes at Arezzo. Any postcard of the frescoes would have been taken, floodlit, from the top of a ladder and not from the visitor's real viewpoint. The composition of these frescoes is thus accumulated in the mind's eye and the eye's memory from a series of views from the ground. Even the postcard is cropped to a detail; unless you have the opportunity to go up the scaffolding with the restorer or the photographer, you will never see them as the total painting that you hold in your imagination at all.

On the same visit I began to think about a new project for a sunken garden.

The new Shoreditch Campus occupies a site of three hectares On entering the campus from Falkirk Street the Northern Courtyard opens out in front of you. The architects had planned it as one of a sequence of public open spaces and sited it on a diagonal route between the garden of similar dimensions in front of the Geffrye Museum and Hoxton Square. It would be accessible from the Public Library occupying one corner of the site. A sunken garden had been proposed to allow daylight into the Resources Centre situated at the centre of the courtyard at lower ground level. It was to be a quiet and contemplative space to be viewed from the windows of this underground library and from the public courtyard above. The architects' plans made provision for water and suggested an area of fourteen metres square with ramped or stepped sides some four metres deep.

When I first saw the site the structure of the surrounding buildings was already in place. In the chaos of the recently dug muddy hole for the sunken garden with my back to the Resources Centre I found myself looking up at a towering plane tree at the ground level above and felt I was standing uncomfortably at the bottom of a pit. I began to imagine retaining walls to lower the gaze. I considered the viewpoints above and below, how the light would come round, how deep it would go at different times of year, how the College buildings might cast shadows, and at ground-level how to come across it in the Northern Courtyard and in the campus as a whole. I began to locate the place, the space, the scale and the context firmly in my inner consciousness.

For the next ten days I was to be in Italy and started looking for walls of appropriate dimensions to establish the scale. In Lucca the city walls support a carriageway enabling viewpoints from above and below; a walled garden or enclosed courtyard provided a sense of enclosure. In Florence one side of a narrow street was bound by a gently curving wall some five metres high, rendered and painted yellow, the colour made all the more beautiful by the diffusion of light over its concave surface. Considering colour and the London climate I turned my camera to the depthless blue sky of Florence in October.

At interview I showed my photographs and suggested the space should be flooded with water. Later it became possible to extend the space so that the blue wall passed out of sight from the library carrying the gaze to the sides of a long pool. After the interview it was agreed that the initial stages should be collaborative and a more interactive approach than might have been envisaged was established from the start.

Unlike the previous projects this work could not have been realised without collaboration.

Somehow the space was Italian from the very beginning. I continually edited and rearranged a series of about thirty images from 15th- and 16th- century Italian paintings and architecture on my studio walls. They included Piero's frescoes in Arezzo where the formal structure of architecture often frames and paces the organic activity of people in the foreground and the natural landscape in the distance. Others were chosen for their construction of spatial dynamic. Views into the distance included a winding river seen in perspective and a standing tree to locate distance. Incidental elements such as these gradually accumulated significance as the work progressed.

A tiny detail from a fresco by Domenico Ghirlandaio in the Basilica di S. Maria Novella in Florence shows two people leaning over a parapet, evidently the low side of a high wall, gazing across at the turrets of distant Florence as they engage in conversation. Once The Sunken Courtyard was completed two people frequently took up their position as though choreographed, to lean over the blue wall.

There are two pools, connected by a weir. A rectangular slate platform appears to float beneath the surface of the upper pool.The Floating Slate acts as a black mirror amongst the white granite setts of the pool-base reflecting the white tree and picking out the leafy shadow of the plane tree. From low angles the slate appears to be very thin and reflects the blue wall more intensely.

Equivalent areas are situated at either end of the long pool on different levels. One end at lower-ground level contains the white tree while above the other at ground level is the viewing platform and slate boulder. Looking east from the viewing platform the reflection of the white tree fills the long pool, from the south the reflection of the blue wall fills the long pool to the weir, while from inside the Resources Centre the blue fills both pools, the meeting point between pool and blue wall appearing like a horizon.

Mosaic
The mosaic of granite setts exists in the image of the water that flows over it. It flows from the base of the wall below the boulder, disappearing into the ground beneath the white tree whose transparent reflection floats in the water over the setts. Like the engraved line that runs the length of Slate Frieze, and the 'rivers' in Island it has neither beginning nor end but is simply a temporary glimpse of something going on. Like Leonardo da Vinci's landscapes and Piero's river it is in the background, the image condensed at low angles of perspective.

When the work was complete it became active. I started to watch the strip of activity taking place in the Northern Courtyard above the wall, like actors on a cinema screen oblivious of this huge calm space beside them. I observed the choreography of the space that we had made and enjoyed the reappearance of two people leaning over the wall having a private conversation in the midst of that busy place.

© Susanna Heron 1999