A Portrait Of The Artist As An Older-Younger Man.
By Lloyd Rundle
A few hours spent in award-winning artist Peter Meacock’s company is exhausting – naturally, I mean that in a good way. Some artists might bore you with self-publicity but Peter’s conversation is quite different. He moves seamlessly from the artistic to the philosophical to the scientific, skipping from childhood memories to adult experiences in a flash as if his life was being played out in his mind all at once.
Like his art, Peter is an enervated mass of ideas, firing on all cylinders. In a matter of moments our discussion moves from his admiration of the Surrealist movement – especially Salvador Dali - to quantum physics to he and his friends’ failed attempts in the early seventies to call America for free using a complex (and perhaps mythic) beep code on coin-operated payphones. Apparently that was just to hear what people on the other side of the Atlantic might actually sound like. But it also illustrates his tireless questioning nature.
BabyBabyBaby, Peter’s first solo art exhibition, is an expression of this rambling, seemingly chaotic thought process which in our conversation shoots off in all directions, but in his work it is brought keenly into focus. His chat may be complex, but simplicity is key to Peter’s art – a singularity of concept and thought on the origins of the universe.
Held at Potassium – a chic, environmentally responsible boutique near Marble Arch which has previously supported a number of arts’ projects – BabyBabyBaby is an exploration of what Peter likes to call, ‘the birth of the megacosm’. An ambitious theme for a first exhibition but then, at 52, Peter is no spring-chicken and while the Big Bang, quantum physics and the nature of the insurmountable life force which births us, binds us and ultimately tears us apart might be daunting for some, Mr Meacock approaches his subject matter with a touch of schoolboy glee.
The man himself towers over me like a bear. Not a Grizzly one, of course - more a giant Teddy bounding about the room with ceaseless energy, his eyes bright with anticipation for anything new and exciting; the only sign of his age a shock of curly and neatly coiffed grey hair with the salt and pepper speckles of its original dark hue. His glasses remind me of Harry Potter and as Peter expounds on the unstoppable forces of the universe I can’t help but think of the boy-wizard’s wonder at the discovery of magic. But Peter’s ideas and concepts revolve around an altogether different form of alchemy.
The exhibition comprises of three works – Goose Baby, Baby and BabyBabyBaby - in which he has spread 10,000 specifically moulded golden bullets over dense uniform black reflective surfaces, to represent points of light shooting forth into the dark nothingness of space at the moment of the Big Bang to form foetal constellations. For Peter it’s the simplest of concepts – the babies depict an origin we all share unquestionably – that are the most profound.
“A lot of modern art has been about death and our mortality,” he says. “That’s a subject in art that I’ve never really pursued. I started at the point of life, a baby, which is a more important question. Go and stand at the end of the conveyor belt and you’ll see that people are dying all the time. But they are being born too. All that naval contemplations until death is pointless because whatever you do, life will continue around you anyway.”
From here, he launches into the beginnings of a political rant about Iraq and the war. “We bombed Iraq,” he tells me. “And yet there are still babies being born there.” Pointing at the thousands of intricately placed golden pellets that make up Goosebaby, he adds with a winning smile: “Babies from bullets.” Then as swiftly as he moved onto contemporary politics, he moves onto something else - new, different and seemingly unrelated. I wouldn’t be surprised if I found myself back at the gates of Baghdad an hour hence, as if we had been discussing it all along. Sometimes it seems as if his mind works like a telephone-exchange, a multitude of dialogues going on at one and the same time which he can tune in and out of at the drop of a hat.
Peter grew up on stud farm near Selbourne, in the Hampshire countryside which he cosily calls ‘Gilbert White’ country. He always felt the creative impulse, he says, but initially he was drawn towards architecture – “a great art form” – and started his career in 1977. However, his creative impulse remained and in 2006 he was commissioned to produce the sculptural installation Atom in the Lake District. The project, launched by the late-Tony Wilson (of Factory Records fame), was finally set in place in the hills near Pendle in 2008 and won the Civic Trust that same year.
A bronze-coated glass reinforced concrete shell which a viewer can comfortably sit inside and be part of, Atom represents the space within and without those building blocks that make up our universe. Atom can be seen as Peter’s first attempt to marry the world of art with scientific theory in a unified whole but, as he is keen to emphasize, he’d been dabbling in science for some time, as much for personal reasons as out of professional interest.
“I did a lot of research,” he says. “A lot of that was because my late-brother William was mentally ill. But also because I had friends who were scientists at Bristol University. It always interested me. I have always followed up on these things, always been talking to scientists.”
His brother’s death in 2006 was evidently a turning-point, which inspired a series of smaller sculptures, among them William and Babybones which are on display at Potassium. These sculptures, forged in his kitchen at his current home in Bath out of modelling clay are overlaid with gold leaf. They set the stage for the BabyBabyBaby exhibition, forming a kind of prologue to the main body of work. Each one is a golden globe, set on a tripod with a baby’s head and wings atop, representing the Earth and the upward motion of, perhaps, the human spirit.
“With my brother’s passing, I was forced to confront where somebody goes when they die,” he says. “It thrust it at me; whatever I did or he did – nature or nurture – he would have died anyway.”
But he’s keen to emphasize that his brother’s passing wasn’t some kind of spark that lit the creative fuse. “I’d already done that,” he says with a jovial smile. “I was making it before William passed away and I dealt with his passing through it. But through the making of this art, I became incredibly excited. It was cathartic, yes. And it was also hysterical. I was in fits of laughter all on my own. It was enormously entertaining.”
Still, William evidently remains an integral part of Peter’s life and work. Goosebaby is, in part, the recreation of a childhood memory of him, depicting a baby surrounded by geese. “We used to have geese as guard dogs,” says Peter. “When William was a little boy he used to hide from us and we’d find him in the Duck house surrounded by bantams, ducks and geese.”
Although Peter is keen to distance himself and his life from his art, they form an intrinsic part of his work – his late-brother especially. As Peter notes on his website (petermeacock.com): “I think of [William] every day and I do not wish him back. I know he is recycled somewhere in somewhere in the Universe.”
Peter cites Salvador Dali and the minimalist artist Donald Judd as his central artistic inspirations. He adds that it was a visit to the Catalan surrealist’s summer house at Port Ligat, in June 2008 that brought his vision into focus. Dali’s humour and creative ability set him on his way. But Peter’s art is altogether more influenced by science, notably the theories of the physicist Stephen Hawking. You don’t need to know quantum physics to understand BabyBabyBaby – but it adds a new dimension to it, if you do.
Hawking's attempts to unlock the mysteries of the universe and his study of black holes revolutionized the scientific world in the 1970s and forced their way onto the public consciousness with the publication of A Brief History of Time in 1988. Peter had always been a fan of science. He remembers the moon landing in 1969 with childlike excitement. “To see that happen was amazing,” he tells me, “I refer back to that all the time.”
And he was an avid fan of the BBC science programme Tomorrow’s World. Hawking's efforts to provide one unifying theory on the origins of the universe may seem quite a jump from there but in Peter’s mind at least, it was a natural progression.
“It’s the breakdown of the idea of man at the centre of universe, integral to Renaissance art,” he says. “From there we had to accept that the sun was at the centre of the universe and we revolved around it. Then suddenly we were at the edge of the universe and now with quantum physics and string theory we’re into multi-dimensional universes. Where does that leave us?
“Understanding the science through the eyes of Hawking’s clearly proffers a new relationship with the maker and even disregards the significance of it by an extremely deft observation. Spontaneous explosion! The Universe is bigger than anyone can even really put a finger on. And a lot bigger than anyone who gets in its way!”
And that for Peter, is what he has attempted to capture in his work – the spontaneous, explosive energy of life bursting forth from a single point of creation. Unstoppable and insurmountable, the stars shooting forth as represented by the golden bullets in each piece to form the image of a baby or babies – an image which unites us all in its simplicity but fragments and breaks up at the edge of the shiny black surface as we might shift off of this mortal coil only to be reborn, to give form to something else. He calls it ‘apoptosis’ defined as the controlled destruction of cells in the growth and development of an organism.
“It’s like the baby in the womb,” he explains. “The hands form as clubs but the cells between the fingers are programmed to die to create the spaces between the fingers. It’s all part of the cycle of life – birth and death – to create form. That’s the nature of life and we are just constituent elements, part of a greater whole.
“I had to go back to the point of origin – that’s what’s important,” he continues. “It’s like Picasso and his drawing of a dove. People said it was simple, that a child could do it. Picasso replied that he had to work all his life to be able to do it – to get that simplicity right. That’s what I’m trying to do. To go back to the point of origin to get it right!
“Now, I’ve got to get back to Bath, I’ve got to get on, I got things to create.” And with that he's off again like a spinning top, shooting out sparks of ideas in all directions but at the point of origin simple, unified and ceaseless.
BabyBabyBaby will run at Potassium until 30th October.
