THE BRICOLEUR

Graham Gingles

The Bricoleur

Mixed media wall sculpture, wood and glass box construction

H 43 cm x W 33 cm x D 9 cm / H 16.93 in x W 12.99 in x D 3.54 in

This artwork is Unique

Certificate of Authenticity included

Every artwork travels protected with the same care with which it was chosen.

Graham Gingles (b. 1943, Larne, Co. Antrim) has built intimate, wall-hung boxed constructions since 1969, working without preparatory drawings or plans, guided instead by instinct and personal memory. Trained at the Belfast College of Art, Hornsey College of Art and the British School at Rome, he makes nearly every element inside each box himself, a working method he has sustained for over five decades and which has placed his work in major public collections, including the Irish Museum of Modern Art and the Ulster Museum.

The title directly names Gingles’ own working method. “Bricoleur” is the term coined by anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss for a maker who builds not from a predetermined plan but from whatever materials, memories and fragments happen to be at hand, assembling meaning through intuition rather than design. It is an almost literal self-portrait of Gingles’ practice: a garden-shed studio crowded with materials and works in progress, an artist who starts instinctively and lets a personal story emerge as he builds, rather than setting out to illustrate one. Compact and dense within its small glazed box, The Bricoleur reads as a condensed statement of method as much as an artwork, memory and material worked by hand into a single, self-contained object.

To collect The Bricoleur is to own a piece that doubles as a kind of artist’s statement, a small, densely worked box that embodies the very process by which it, and nearly every piece Gingles has made since 1969, came into being. It is a rare, entirely handmade work by an artist whose singular practice sits in the same institutional company as the Irish Museum of Modern Art and the Ulster Museum.