The Out There is Right Here

Blunk Space is pleased to present _The Out There is Right Here_, an exhibition of new works by Ian Collings in conversation with historic works by JB Blunk, Gordon Onslow Ford, and John Anderson. Collings sourced stone locally while staying and working at the Blunk House, Blunk’s handbuilt home and studio in Inverness, California. In the 1950s and ’60s, Blunk was part of a constellation of artists surrounding British Surrealist painter Gordon Onslow Ford on his property, the Bishop Pine Preserve. Though working across stone, wood, ceramic, and painting, these artists coalesced around intuitive mark-making, Eastern philosophy, and a deep integration with the land of West Marin. Drawing on this ethos, Collings has created five functional stone works, two stone and wood sculptures, and is debuting five sculptural wall-mounted wood works, alongside a selection of smaller stone objects. A selection of historic paintings by Blunk, Onslow Ford, and Anderson further grounds Collings’ new works in the material spirit of West Marin. Now based in Ojai, California, Collings sculpts objects inspired by the landscape that ultimately could not exist without the material of that land itself: the veins and the natural hollows of the stone, the colors that must be revealed through human hands. For this exhibition, he sourced richly chromatic jasper stones from the same area where Blunk often dug his clay. Collings’ new functional works echo the stools and side tables Blunk made for the house, both in their scale and in playful references to the human figure. Whether functional or not, each object translates the fluid motion of the water used in stone-carving into the jasper or jade itself, its concentric ripples echoing the invisible ripples of heat, light, and sound that surround us. The result is a manifestation of the cosmos in the most terrestrial of forms. This translation of the cosmos was the ultimate goal of intuitive marking-making for the artists of the Bishop Pine Preserve. Onslow Ford and then Anderson, his longtime studio assistant, honed a restricted vocabulary of forms and a process of constant iteration that prevented self-conscious control, allowing the subconscious to take over. Onslow Ford’s 1959 painting _Primordial Play_ (created the year Blunk began building his house on the Preserve), illustrates his strict system of lines, dots, and circles, which variously reflects the movement of the sun or the maelstrom of biology. Anderson’s restrained works on paper transmit cosmic meaning through the simple gesture of breaking a horizontal line. For Blunk and now Collings, intuitive making means allowing their materials to dictate form, engaging in conversation with the stone, following its veins, watching water reveal its brilliance, and giving that cascade enduring form. This way of working is inherently humbling: each artist is not a genius giving life to form, but rather a conduit and interpreter for the already-ancient cosmos and natural world, which are in turn reflections of each other. This stone has been coming together over eons, just as the flicker we see in the night sky is from a star that may no longer exist. This way of working is inherently humbling: each artist is not the genius giving life to form, but rather a conduit and an interpreter for the already-ancient cosmos and natural world, which are in turn reflections of each other. This stone has been coming together over eons, just as the flicker we see in the night sky is from a star that may no longer exist. The Bishop Pine Preserve no longer exists in its original form, but its imprint on the land endures. Living and working at the Blunk House, Collings metabolized his time there, making unique works in conversation with its previous inhabitants and with the art that carried their relationship with the land. The land, the cosmos, and humankind’s interior world are ever-changing, bringing forth fruitful new contradictions and syntheses, reminding us that what feels distant, “out there,” is always and already right here.