Turner’s Throne
English or Welsh, circa 1640
turned ash and walnut, oak boards, later brocade cushion with horsehair padding, applied paper label: G 150, Henry VIII Chair, Scandinavian Type.
142 x 80 x 73.5 cm / 56 x 32 x 29 in
Courtesy Simon Andrews and Sadie Coles HQ, London.
Photo: Katie Morrison
Since the earliest advanced cultures, a throne has been accepted as the defining claim towards authority and the manifestation of hierarchical power. Traditionally a symbol of divine, secular or autocratic supremacy, the form may be distinguished by specific aesthetic and structural criteria that allows for unique and significant differentiation from the holder’s entourage. These features may normally include a raised or elevated seating platform, often associated with a high backrest or canopy. As an extension of authority, armrests and pommels may be exaggerated or over-sized. Where decoration is applied, this will serve to communicate the domain over which the holder bears reign. The autocratic resonance of a throne is such that, even when empty, it may symbolise the everlasting presence of dynastic authority.
Executed around 1640, one may reflect that the Turner’s Throne has borne silent witness to the arching trajectory of modern Britain, four centuries within which political, social, regional and international aspirations have sought to bear fruit. As the freshly-cut wood of the newly-made Turner’s Throne began to cure and harden, Roundheads and Royalists wreaked internecine rampage through towns and fields of rural England. The monarchy was abolished, and was then re-instated. For London came pestilence then inferno, rebuilt as modern under Wren and Hawksmoor, before embracing an assured sense of destiny as Crown and Empire inaugurated a new Georgian era.
The talent of a turner was a singular one, skilled only in turning wooden rods to be slotted or pegged together for use as spokes in spinning wheels and spindles for furniture, or small domestic objects, bowls and candlesticks included. Theirs was an itinerant and rural craft, to which Britain’s great forests of ash, oak and walnut provided ample resource. The turners supplied their community, which by the mid-seventeenth century also comprised the affluent yeomen, merchants and manufacturers of a new middle class, and for whom symbols and assets, thrones also perhaps, became an essential aspiration of new status and authority. Grandly rudimentary yet structurally efficient, the Turner’s Throne celebrates the intuitive fluency of vernacular architecture, anticipating the minimalism to which the modern era would eventually aspire. A beam-and-post scaffold for status unencumbered by the distraction of decoration, and far from the constructed pretensions of the social elite. And so in substance and resonance the throne belongs to the soil, to the skies and the forests of an ancient Albion that acquiesces to no credo. Instead an indelible pagan reverie, a crafted totem to the Tree of Life.
“A room without furniture, an empty house, a desert island — starting from scratch with a few packing cases.
In any of these situations the sculptor, after a lifetime of improvising, will reach for his tools. They are contained in a shallow box with a linen hinge and a rope handle. Another box contains the essentials of life — soap & salt, a towel and two mugs. To hang these minimal items on the wall a grill is made with the same dimensions as the boxes.
The grill also acts as a backrest for the boxes now transformed into a chair. Being geometric these boxes may evolve into a bed or, with additions stack to become a major storage unit.
Like the raw material itself, each part has a strength and individual identity and peculiar honesty, like Shaker furniture. Using basic box wood, an improvised look with the woodwork bearing the stamps of its travels or provenance, one is reminded of the early still life constructions of Picasso or Rodchenko.”
— Eduardo Paolozzi, 1987
Emphasising found objects, detritus, collage and improvisation Paolozzi pioneered the conceptual foundations of British and international Pop Art. Assembled from abandoned packing crates and timber appropriated from the delivery yard behind Zeev Aram’s Covent Garden showroom, the Sculptor’s Chair is a continuum of this narrative. The chair’s construction is simple, efficient and effective. Hammer marks, pencil calibrations, knots and nails reveal a process that is assured and certain. Several of the boards conspicuously retain grease-pencil destinations or shipping labels, usurping their discarded aspirational objectives to create a new heraldry — a Utopian throne for the willing castaway.
With social discord disrupting both city centres and coal-mining shires, by the mid-1980s Britain had de-industrialised to reveal sparse and derelict terrain beneath. The iron that once built an Empire was now scrap sold by the tonne — fertile ammunition for a new generation of partisans who celebrated a noisy collage of Merz detritus, post-punk heavy metal romanticised with just a dash of pop Armageddon.
Retrospection may assign Dixon’s Skeleton Throne as Memento Mori, an ergonomically calligraphic Dorian Gray, cheerfully assured of the inevitable impermanence of human endeavours, yet willing to offer us a seat for the ride. Or perhaps his are the skull-and-bones of the pirate’s tattered wind-torn Jolly Roger, announcing buccaneering riposte to turbulent seas.
Dixon’s is a message of necessary cultural evolution, an informal celebration of discarded fragments of an imperial heritage now scavenged and repurposed for shock and discomfort. A changing-of-the-guard over choppy waters, the memory of a mighty industrial revolution now welded firmly shut.
Tom Dixon with Skeleton Throne, 1985
© Tom Dixon
Photo: Cindy Palmano
21st October 1805 — an announcement of engagement, transmitted by semaphore flags from the masts of Nelson’s Victory to his assembled fleet, gathered in Cape Trafalgar to confront those of France and Spain, promises militant defiance and virtue in the face of opposition. England Expects Every Man To Do His Duty — a heroic mantra destined for resounding echo upon repeating daydreams of national identity, for Englishmen still yet to be born.
The flag was commissioned to celebrate homecoming, gallantly rigged below the Union Jack as officers and crew of HMS Sans Pareil returned to port and family after years of seafaring to the furthermost destinations of British imperial interest. Hand-stitched aboard ship from Chinese silk — that valuable asset of international trade — the sky-blue standard records the Black Sea engagements that preceded this, the second of the ship’s visits to China in 1857. Nelson’s charge emblazoned along, now manifesto for the Queen's Britain.
When the ship drew into Plymouth harbour in December 1859 she had for one year already been under the command of Captain Rochfort Maguire. No stranger to the globe’s oceans, Maguire’s prior commission had been to lead his survey cutter deep into the Arctic Circle. His mission then, as fruitless as all those before and those to come, to discover the fate of Sir John Franklin’s doomed odyssey, lost with all hands aboard Erebus & Terror.
17th century international trade precipitated a fashion for rare and exotic sea-shells, triggering an enthusiasm that bloomed to embrace elaborate and reverentially-displayed compositions, and initiating a fashion for shell grottoes within the courts of the British aristocracy that was to last until well into Queen Victoria’s reign.
By the end of the 19th century, the popularity of shellwork had broadened to encompass all aspects of British society. Sailors and those living near ports would create portable objects to include boxes, frames or ornaments that could be sold to supplement their income. Amongst the British middle and upper classes, shellwork became a fashionable distraction for society ladies. Although considered a purely ornamental pursuit, the pastime was guided by the prevailing Victorian desire to establish order, and to reimagine and recompose artefacts of Nature.
Assembled around 2600 BC Avebury is the largest stone circle in Europe, and comprises of a henge with a large outer stone circle, with two smaller stone circles towards the centre of the monument. Approximately twenty-five miles away, lies Stonehenge, built over several stages around 3000 - 2000 BC. Geological research has confirmed that the smaller bluestones that form Stonehenge’s inner circle were quarried from North Pembrokeshire, some 160 miles away. The massive, iconic Sarsens were locally sourced and probably incorporated into the monument several centuries later. Avebury and Stonehenge are together sited within a dense complex of Neolithic and Bronze Age ceremonial sites, including hundreds of burial mounds, that together appear to collectively form a vast sacred landscape.
During the 1740s, the antiquarian William Stukeley linked both Avebury and Stonehenge with Druidic rites, inaugurating a wave of semi-occult Albion studies that offered a spiritual alternative to the mechanisation of British society, now at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution.
Using twelve-exposure film and a medium-format camera, the photographer carefully annotated the colour positives with the exact location and date of each frame. The portraits of the monumental sentinels that encircle the village of Avebury in Wiltshire are rendered to emphasise their solemn inertia, and are carefully void of contemporary human intrusion. The spectator is conscious that these rugged totems of an unclaimed spirituality have borne witness to the entire span of mankind’s evolution, transcending our modern impulse for familiar logic to instead summon a porous yearning for ceremony and congregation. By contrast, the images of Stonehenge celebrate that very request for communal engagement that is absent from the silent scenery of Avebury. A tentative yet intuitive curiosity guides the participants to connect with the timeless architecture of the site, spellbound by the need to gather. Invited by the resonance of ancient memory, the figures assemble to conquer, to contemplate, to caress, or simply to seek shelter in the long shadows of Midsummer.
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![Sculptor's Chair, 1987 [portrait of the artist] © Paolozzi Foundation, Courtesy the Artist, Simon Andrews and Sadie Coles HQ, London. Photo: Snowdon / Trunk Archive](https://artlogic-res.cloudinary.com/w_2000,h_1400,c_limit,f_auto,fl_lossy,q_auto:best/ws-sadiecoles/usr/exhibitions/images/exhibitions/967/eduardo_paolozzi__sculptor_s_chair__1985-87.jpeg)
