Jackie Abey and Jill Smallcombe have made artworks out of earth works. To impart their knowledge and to show off their skills (which are considerable) they will be at the Appledore Arts Festival, and they will be teaching on the Dartmoor Arts Project in July (July 26 - August 2). Lee Morgan speaks to these cob specialist
What is cob?
Jackie Abey reaches into her bag to pull out two hunking squares of what could be marble. One’s honey coloured, the other is an earthy red.
‘That,’ she says, ‘˜is cob.’
Jackie Abey and Jill Smallcombe have been working together in the medium, which is a nice way of saying mud, since the two of them got together to make a cob sculpture for Chagford Arts Festival out of remixed 400-year-old cob. That was 12 years ago, and since then they’ve been experimenting with it for their sculptural structures and art works. And both of them live in cob houses.
Through the incarnation of Abey Smallcombe these cobbers (or cob experts or cob artists) have taken the versatility, strength and unique nature of cob along with their artistic vision and enthusiasm into a beautiful sculptural cob waiting room/toilets at the Eden Project, cob summer houses for the National Trust and SW Lakes Trust and shelters for Sustrans Cycle Routes. They are also working at Landscore, Hennock and Doddiscombleigh Primary Schools, and are fresh from their week at Eco Build at Earls Court.
Apparently one of the most popular questions throughout the exhibition was ‘what is cob?’ Undeterred they launch into an explanation, the smile still in place and with an undinting energy.
Cob is subsoil mixed with straw and water. It’s mixed with a lot of stamping, then built up in layers and shaped accordingly. It dries very hard in the air. The walls are thick and it’s incredibly strong, as long as water doesn’t get in the top of it. Traditionally, you only build with cob ‘between the swallows arriving and the swallows flying’ to ensure (as far as possible) good working conditions. You must give it ‘a good hat and a good pair of boots’ to stop the water getting in.
‘There are 40,000 cob buildings still in use,’ says Jackie, and plenty of them are in Devon – cob is a south west speciality. ‘Typically they are thatched and chocolate boxy.’ Like the houses that the pair themselves live in. But living in earth isn’t just a Devon phenomenon. One-third of the world’s population still live in earth-built homes and the variety and styles change throughout the world.
Earth building is incredibly sustainable.
‘Earth is pure with nothing added. It has been used for centuries and there is a place for it in the future,’ says Jill. But the Abey Smallcombe story starts 12 years ago when the two artists who live in cob houses embarked on their collaboration, creating a figurative cob sculpture.
‘The legs fell off, the arms fell off,’ says Jackie. ‘But we were learning all the time and we haven’t looked back. Our sculptures are integeral to our work. They allow us to play with the material and we have recently embarked on a new series of conceptual abstract pieces.’ However, it was the design and build and scale of the bus shelter at the Eden Project that was the watershed. They were able to demonstrate modern flowing design, exciting use of light and an ability to improvise that reflected their artistic standing.
Jackie says: ‘We spend a lot of our time educating people about the possiblities of cob, through workshops and lectures.’
During the courses and workshops they are able to get bricklayers and architects working alongside arts. ‘It creates a whole new buzz,’ says Jackie.
And there’s something universal and fundamental, about working with soil – it ties you to the past and is tied with human development. On one hand, it’s simple – children love playing with mud and creating their pies – and yet it can be incredibly sophisticated: Jackie and Jill have experimented with hair, hemp, flax and nettles instead of straw for a finer mix to create unusual earth plasters and other finishes.
And despite their eco build credentials and their commitment to education, not least through their 3 Little Pigs projects in primary schools or the work they do with Farms for City Children, or even their work on the Dartmoor Arts Project, the pair are artists at heart and are looking to further their arts practice. They have exhibited at the Spacex Gallery, Exeter Phoenix, the Architecture Centre, Chelsea Flower show, Broomhill, Delamore and Cotehele.
With the external sculptures, water damage can create a beautiful disintegration. They opted for gold leaf to protect the points of their Broomhill sculpture, which glinted in the sunlight. When Jackie and Jill talk of the future they have their own glint in their eyes – and why not, the earth’s their oyster.
For more on cob and the varied earth works of Jackie Abey and Jill Smallcombe visit their website.
they will also be part of the Dartmoor Arts Project
• Jill has written a book with Jane Schofield: Cob Buildings – A Practical Guide Published by Black Dog Press.
ISBN 0 9524341 5 6.
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May 24th, 2008
posted by Jess Sains
‘Terrorism’ has come to Exeter this week. On Thursday May 22, 2008 (perhaps to be known in the future as 22/5) a small bomb exploded in the Giraffe restaurant in the new Princesshay shopping centre in Exeter city centre.
Since then there have been a lot of labels placed. The ’suspect’ (label one) is a ‘gentle giant’ (label two), who has been ‘radicalised’ (label three) to the Islamic faith and there is the biggest label of all (label four) that he ‘has a history of mental illness’.
So, already we have been told a good deal of loose information about a man whom I have only seen in a fuzzy photo with blood all over his face. Information. Or labels? Labels have so much connotation in them, they can effect how people are viewed by ourselves and others for their whole live. Yet, we – and particularly our media – slap them on people on a daily basis. David Cameron is a ‘Old Etonian toff”, others are ‘yummy mummies’, ‘hippies’, ‘addicts’, ’scroungers’ or ‘terrorists’. All these labels bare with them connotations; the yummies will be dressed up to the nines, driving a 4X4 and castigating any woman who works whilst her children are young; the scroungers will be on the dole, perhaps - another label here - a bit chavvy or having too many children for good tax-payers comfort. Most dripping with unspoken intuitions of all of these labels are the two ‘terrorist’ and ‘mental illness’.
‘Terrorist’ means, in this day and age, that you will kill anyone for a cause. A few years ago the unspoken connotations might have included things like ‘Irish Republican Army’ or even possibly something to do with anti-vivisection, now what hangs in the air is ‘Islamic fundamentalism’, ‘Bin Laden’, ‘September the 11th’. Sitting in the darkness at the very back of all these words are falling towers, smoky tube tunnels, blood soaked faces, death.
We live in an age where all media events are played out on our screens. I, like millions of others, was sat watching the television when the second plane hit the World Trade Centre, was enthralled to the news by the time the Tavistock Square bus was blown up. All this instantaneous action and reaction makes labels all the more pervasive. They are thrown out there, stuck on a person before we even know what’s happened. I remember when the first plane had hit in 2001 sitting there watching and the reporter telling us all that the attacks were suspected to be by ‘anarchists’. I knew that wasn’t so straight away. ‘Anarchist’ is a label I wear; my ‘anarchism’ is something to be proud of, an ideal, yet I know that for others my label is something quite different. I am likely to be ‘trouble’, ‘rebellious’, I have ‘issues with authority figures’ – I might even throw bombs… we all wear so many labels – ‘loud’, ‘fat’, ‘thin’, ‘rude’, ‘boring’ – that some almost seem to lose their meaning. But that’s just it, they are both meaningless and yet the connotations hang in the air around us, they are stamped on us, they make us “other†and “other†is scary.
That’s what labels are, ultimately; making someone unlike oneself. That makes oneself there person who is ‘OK’ and the other the one who is outside the circle, who is different. It is only when we peel off the labels that we can truly see the person:
I am an anarchist. I am a daughter. I am fat. I am loud. I am a sister. I am a politics geek. I am a partner. I was home educated.
I am Jess.
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May 24th, 2008
posted by Cptn
There’s even more action than usual in Mutley next week with the Mutley Greenbank Festival, kicking off on Monday with a party in a park which includes friends to the republic, Lemanis. But before you put your dancing shoes on have a gander at what else is going on in the weeklong events that focus on arts, the environment and the community.
The week of events launch on Monday May 26 at the Levinsky building, Plymouth Uni, and there’s stuff for old and young including activities and circus skill and animation and dance, films and a cafe. (starts at 11am)
Also on Monday is the Party in the (Moorview) Park, featuring the cool sounds of Drinking Peanuts,starting proceedings at 1pm. Followed by Duncan Thorne, “and singer/songwriter Jimmy Buddha Om, the man behind the Acoustic Café evenings at the Fortescue pub. Tim Page, legendary blues guitarist and singer, will be performing with Bekah Billington, and Lemanis will be bringing their complex and interesting mix of harmonies, backed by an orchestra of wind, brass and string instruments. The evening sounds commence with get-up-and-dance local band The Bernies, followed by The Wireless, just back from a festival in Nice, and are set to crescendo with the ever popular Mad Dog McCrea.”
But that’s just Monday, there’s stuff going on every day culminating in a two-day Big Days in the Park event in Freedom Fields Park on Saturday May 31 and Sunday June 1.
Combine this with craft fair, art events, environmental afternoons and workshops and courses and you’ve got one heck of a hip and happening week, cunningly planned to co-incide with half term, in everyone’s favourite bit of the city.
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We cannot live on love alone
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May 24th, 2008
