The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - The Telegraph Magazine
THE ST IVES SCHOOL
‘I still have a “Save Barnoon” T-shirt,’ laughs Fobert . Then, following the acquisition by Cornwall Council of the land where Fobert ’s excavation eventually took place, a new competition was launched.
‘ The delay was useful in the end,’ says Nicholas Serota, director of Tate from 1988 until this summer. ‘Things had changed. We realised we needed a space where many different ar t forms could take place – film, video, performance and so on. The original building already offered spectacular views. We didn’t need any more of
those. In the ’70s and ’80s, there was a big move by architects to open up the art institution, to make the insides visible. We’ve moved on from that. It’s more about the beautiful gallery space inside the building.’
Fobert, undeterred, won the competition again in 2012 – his buried-belowground scheme actually increasing the number of spaces in the car park, to
‘The gallery can now show the full complement of Barbara Hepworth sculptures‘
local delight (parking is a red-hot issue in St Ives). Corners of Fobert’s original pavilion have been chamfered away to ensure houses on top of the hill keep their sea views. ‘Some architects come up with a vision first and make it work second,’ says Fobert, ‘ but I prefer to solve the practical things first and the architecture comes later.’
Mark O ster field, Tate St Iv es’ executive director (also a trained ballet dancer and a fine artist) agrees. The brief, he says, included the large exhibition space, educational facilities, and a way to get huge pieces of work in and out of the building. ‘Jamie laid everything out and then jigsawed all the parts together. That ’s when the form emerges and you get a unique set of spaces.’
Inside, the main gallery ’s ceiling is a grid of pale grey concrete beams – reminiscent of those in the local sail lofts – which for all their lightness can carry the weight of four double-decker buses. The floor is concrete, with gritty inclusions of aggregate – ‘I wanted it to feel beachy,’ says Fobert. ‘One of the first things Nick Serota said to me was, “Never forget that this is Cornwall.”’
For the opening, it will be filled with the work of Reb e cca Warren, the 52-year-old British sculptor shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 2006. Fobert was thrilled to find out she would be first in – ‘Her work is so alive,’ he says of her animated semi-abstract bronze figures – and that she wanted to make full use of his carefully precise daylight.
‘One of the first things said to me was, “Never forget that this is Cornwall”’
Serota, meanwhile, approves the connection that Warren makes with Barbara Hepworth, the town’s most famous female artist, whose own sculpture garden is just up the road. ‘Hepworth feels the landscape, and refers back to the mythic form, the obelisk, [while] Rebecca Warren is into Robert Crumb and comics and the quirks of the human body. But both of them work with the human figure.’
Warren’s new work comes under the title All That Heaven Allows, after the Technicolor 1955 melodrama by Douglas Sirk, in which a put-upon Jayne Wyman falls in love with a rugged gardener played (quite convincingly, considering everything about the movie is desperately camp) by Rock Hudson in a checked shirt. Warren’s figures, standing three metres high, are streake d with the candy colours of the film.
Subsequent shows will feature the 20th-century artist Patrick Heron and a look at Virginia Woolf ’s connection to St Ives (the lighthouse that inspired her 1927 novel To the Lighthouse can be found here). Fobert remarks that he can’t get away from the Bloomsbury set – he’s also working at Charleston, their Sussex playground, making barn-like buildings in concrete and Corten steel to house new gallery spaces and the archive. But before that ’s completed in the spring of nex t year, he’ll be celebrating the opening of the Tate St Ives, wearing his ‘Save Barnoon’ T-shirt under his suit.