HEIRLOOMS OF THE FUTURE
ANN CARRINGTON
Meet the award-winning artist repurposing antique buttons, pearls, coins and cutlery into showstopping works of art, fit for a queen
Years ago, when sculptor Ann Carrington’s young son had chickenpox and couldn’t go to nursery, Carrington took him roaming in London. At one point they stopped near Trafalgar Square, captivated by the window of a stamp shop. They couldn’t go inside, but Carrington’s eye was caught by a tiny stamp with a pro le of The Queen, designed by Arnold Machin in 1970; she went back the next day and bought it. ‘I knew it was the beginning of something,’ she says. ‘When I blew the stamp up to a large scale, all the printing dots looked like buttons and I thought, “That’s perfect – pearly kings and queens and buttons and alternative royal families”. The stories dovetailed.’
Carrington o en plays with scale in this way, turning familiar objects into pieces the viewer is forced to observe in a fresh light. Besides the Pearly Queen bu on tapestries, which grew out of her almost Pointillist reworking of Machin’s stamp (and will no doubt be even more sought after this year in light of The Queen’s Platinum Jubilee), this can be seen in works such as her 12 giant ‘shell lady’ sculptures. Made from real scallop shells collected from local shermen, they appeared around Margate over summer 2008 (you can still see one today at the town’s Shell Gro o). A huge 12-foot bronze version also sits outside Margate’s Turner Contemporary gallery, in homage to Mrs Booth, Turner’s landlady and partner.
Other significant pieces include The Royal Jubilee Banner (also embroidered pearly-style with thousands of gold buttons and hung from the royal barge during 2012’s Diamond Jubilee pageant); White Cloud City and Wing Wo Wave – twin sailing junks dripping with strings of car-boot-sale-foraged pearls and named after the locations of two of China’s largest pearl accessories factories; and Devil’s Trumpet, a floral sculpture made from antique cutlery. The latter was acquired by the V&A and is now on permanent display in its silver galleries, while Carrington’s long list of private collectors includes Paul Smith, Elton John and Gwyneth Paltrow.
Repurposing materials comes naturally to her. ‘I’ve always had scrapbooks and made collages from stamps, fruit wrappers, and interesting things I would nd on the street or in my pocket,’ she says. Carrington studied at Bournville College of Art before doing a BA in Fine Art at Trent Polytechnic. ‘I was a good painter, but a boring painter,’ she says of her transition from fine art to sculpture. ‘I got a place on the sculpture course at the Royal College of Art, and that’s when I went for it.’
Few Homes & Antiques readers would count antique cutlery, stamps or pearls as ‘rubbish’, but the old adage that ‘one man’s trash is another’s treasure’ has never been more magnificently realised than in Carrington’s works. ‘I don’t use any old material to make any old sculpture,’ she adds. ‘The materials have to resonate.’
The cutlery bouquets came about after a trip to the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. ‘I love the Dutch still lifes of the 16th and 17th centuries, and I was thinking that the only thing surviving from them today would be the silver. I wondered how I could make a contemporary version and I realised that, if I took the cutlery and goblets out of the picture, I could rebuild them as a bouquet. I already had vintage cutlery in the studio and the piles of spoons looked like petals; the materials were almost asking to be made into something.’
Carrington prefers to work with pieces that are slightly damaged. ‘When they’re all silver and polished, they look dull. When they’re worn, with the gold coming through the silver and scratches and bumps on them, they’re beautiful.’ The less value the materials have, she adds, the more freeing they are to work with.
Other materials Carrington works with are coins. ‘My father’s a coin collector and every birthday I’d be given a coin in a plastic case and think “Oh no, not again”.’ A few years ago, with a bit of distance, she realised she loved coins and made a series of works inspired by them. Amplifying the scale again, she starts with an original coin then draws it, projects the drawing onto tin or pewter, hammers it out using repoussé, and adds banknote-style guilloché patterns around the coins.
This variety of techniques in Carrington’s work is testament to her willingness to learn new skills. ‘When I had the idea for the bouquets, I started gluing bits together and it didn’t work, so I ended up taking myself o to evening classes for six months and learning to weld,’ she says. And the repoussé? This idea was inspired by a man hammering out a tray in Marrakech. Carrington asked how much he wanted for it. ‘He quoted some stupid price, so I asked how he’d come up with it and he said “Oh I charge per bang… more bang for the buck”. I thought that was brilliant, and decided that was how I was going to make my coins.’ anncarrington.co.uk