Allen Jones

Description

In his response to the artifice of cultivated landscape, Allen Jones sought to make a sculpture which used that artifice to distort scale and distance and to manipulate our perception of space, much as eighteenth-century landscape architects did when introducing decorative buildings and follies into their schemes. From far away the door to the temple suggests that a person may enter the inner space in comfort. The fact is that it is just over one and a half metres high, and an average adult has to stoop to get inside. This visual trick makes the sculpture appear larger than it is. This square building with its ziggurat roof could have been an elaborate plinth for a figurative sculpture. The four-square outer form gives lie to the inner space which is circular and with a conical ceiling that opens to the sky. The figure stands above, on a corner of the roof, so that from inside the pavilion it may be viewed from below, something akin to the experience of seeing someone on a high diving board from the depths of a swimming pool.

The figure itself is much more chunky than Allen Jones's aesthetic normally allows. The curves had to be gentle in order to receive the tesserae of the mosaic - a more curvaceous form would have meant using much smaller pieces. To describe form with colour Jones asked the mosaicist to lay out ranges of tessera from yellow to red and from green to blue. They discovered that within the cooler portion of the spectrum the range was much larger than in the hotter hues. Jones has also used colour to introduce the notion of movement in the figure, with the alternate arms of yellow and green in diagonally opposing positions, indicating more an action for semaphore than that of a Hindu deity. This work is full of echoes - of past artistic practice, of other cultures, of other art forms, of the woodland landscape - made unconsciously, but discovered en route.