Dancing Lightly on the Earth
Bamboology by Joseph Williams
Tell us about your early years and what led you to your chosen university subject.
Joseph. I grew up in the countryside, swimming in the sea at Pett Level, running down hills, camping on the beach; it was idyllic. It was nurturing for my creativity, and my imagination always had a lot of space to be free. Because of that environment, I was allowed to be a child for longer than some.
I was aware of art from a young age. My mum’s passion for art history took us to London regularly to see exhibitions, and my grandmother passed down a love of ballet. I have two aunties who are artists; Wendy is a painter of the landscapes I grew up in, amongst other things, and Sally is a sculptor of stone.
I went to school at St Thomas, and we would visit Winchelsea Church. I’d look up at the huge stained-glass windows; it was a visceral experience of colour and light. I had some wonderful teachers like Cliff Dean, who would take us on nature walks around Winchelsea and point out the birds. He would get us to read poetry, so I appreciated exposure to that.
Finding out I was dyslexic was a helpful label to understand my frustrations with literacy, and I was lucky enough to get good support at Frewen College in Northiam. However, I felt very other there; I spent the whole year six thinking something was wrong with me. But fortunately, it gave me the support
I needed to get into mainstream education.
I had fantastic art teachers at secondary school, Bay Leeds and Mark Smith. They gave me the confidence to explore sculpture, life drawing, textiles, and printmaking. I’d get fairly obsessed with my projects and find myself working over the weekends or falling asleep with a notepad of ideas.
It never felt like “work”; it just wanted to come out, so I got to keep playing. I loved the immediacy, I imagined, and then I made it.
Alongside art, I loved physics, especially mechanics, and if I hadn’t studied architecture, I would’ve studied biology. I decided to study architecture because it combined the imaginative world-building I found in art with a fascination with biological and mathematical systems.
“I used to get utterly lost in Lego as a child; I’d spend hours building things in our little cottage in Pett. I always could hyper-focus.”
How did your studies and other influences inspire you along the way?
Joseph. I have a half-uncle, Jasper, who’s a Danish architect. I went to Denmark with my family and visited him. I saw his architecture office for the first time, an illuminated drawing board at the top of an old radio tower in the industrial docks of Aalborg. He was fascinating and kind, a collector surrounded by exciting things.
I went to study Architecture at Oxford Brookes University. The course was fascinating, and I was surrounded by other creative thinkers. Architecture is a broad church at university with a pokey mix of subjects such as garden cities and constructivism. One day to engineering software and Blade Runner the next. Outside of this, I was finding my feet and independence, living as a student and partying a lot. I managed to maintain this balancing act for
the first couple of years.
In the summers, I worked in the building trade and at Great Dixter’s Nursery. I had developed a passion for long-distance trekking; by that point, it had taken me to the Thorong La Pass and the length of the GR20. I enjoy the simplicity of walking through vast landscapes with everything I needed on my back, wild camping on the trail and drinking spring water.
After my second year, I was on a two-week trek along the high-altitude Haute Randonnée Pyrénéenne with a friend. We walked from France down into Spain, from there we travelled to Madrid by bus and then to Boom Festival in Portugal. There, I was consumed head first into a 7-day-long psytrance rave with generations of ravers from around the world. It felt like a tribe, a secret dancing subculture. But what impressed me was the art, especially the incredible and inventive architecture.
They used unprocessed natural materials in the round, like bamboo and eucalyptus poles. It was resourcefully designed, combined with sophisticated rigging techniques and vibrant fabric to make immense tensile architectural environments.
It was seriously intelligent engineering, making me question the role of traditional architecture and the direction I was taking.
After a challenging third year of university, I returned to work at Great Dixter and helped out potting; I’m not a horticulturist, but I could recognise the craft around me. It’s an incredibly special place there, with some inspiring characters.
The fourth year was my most engaged yet under the tutelage of Declan Molloy, a soft-spoken ex-punk from the west coast of Ireland.
“They were these understated hippies building 50-meter-wide dance temples, and I couldn’t believe what I saw. It opened my mind to this whole other world.”
I got a placement at an architecture firm in London; technically, it was kind of interesting, and I got to see how architects and business structures operate in that kind of practice. But I quickly got bored. I wrote to the artist I saw at Boom, Gerard Minakawa. I first saw his work in 2018 at the main dance arena. It was vast, and the bamboo had this wonderful rhythm to it. I was lucky that Gerard replied, and after a short stay in London, I was off to California.
I worked for three months with him in Joshua Tree. We built a whole project from scratch. I was in a state of hypergrowth and development, absorbing everything. It was a short period but incredibly intense.
Gerard had become a master craftsman over 20 years, and I felt as if I was in a medieval guild watching the creation of bamboo cathedrals.
His structures have an American flavour of building big and building fast. It was exciting and broke the conventions of what I had been taught. He is an artist working nomadically with a large team travelling to remote sites. We built in Vegas, north California, and then I flew to Portugal with him and returned
to Boom, this time to build.
So, I learned a building methodology that enabled large-scale, temporary installations. Then, in complete contrast, I returned to London and got a place at an old-school architectural firm. It had its lessons and merits; I learned much about detailing, technical draftsmanship and communicating with engineers.
I then wanted to learn about prefabrication, so I moved to Hastings to work as a designer for a bespoke fabrication firm. Again, I learned a lot
of valuable skills that I employ in my artwork today, like how to turn a new concept design into drawings for a fabrication process.
So, by this stage, you’ve gained the knowledge to focus on your work.
Joseph. Yes, during this time in Hastings, I started making my projects at full scale. I wanted to express less tangible, more imaginative concepts. I’d write a brief, draw, model, and fabricate them. The Pilgrimage Camp, for instance, was an exploration of place-making in the landscape. I imagined what a camp would be for techno peasants of the future. It consisted of a lightweight tent, a gold foil dish suspended next to it on a bamboo tripod.
When the lockdown hit, two life-changing things happened. I met the love of my life, India, and with her, I could focus all my creative attention on my artwork for the first time. I put all of my resources and whatever savings I had into my next major project. It was called Meadow Muse and was a response to Great Dixter. It started as a sketch on a scrap of cardboard upon the potting station; they kindly allowed it to be sited in their meadow. So I responded to that meadow, the hot summer and seed heads. It was inspired by my projects in Portugal, built upon my knowledge of bamboo
and the natural strength of geometry.
I called what I was doing Bamboology; the name helps me think of what I do as a manifesto rather than my personality. The original description of Bamboology has developed and changed. At the start, I used the phrase Dancing Lightly on the Earth, with Bamboo and Colour. Dancing was the idea’s core, an expression of joyous movement and a balanced response to gravity.
With those early projects under your belt, the creative briefs started to come in and scale up.
Joseph. I started applying for opportunities to make more art to apply myself to a more collaborative brief. I was selected as an artist in residence as part of Climate Art’s: A Vanished Sea. It was a fantastic brief to respond to, set in and around Rye Harbour Nature Reserve (RHNR). It was about climate change with a focus on the environment at Rye Harbour and how art can make us look at our relationship with nature in new ways. This all started during the end
of the pandemic.
I wanted to draw from the many layers that make up the experience of living in the area, including the immovable fortifications of our past cultural responses to invasion. Their presence still felt relevant. I wanted to make a form that was open and transient, not defensive and permanent. I focused on the Yellow Horned Poppy that would bloom during the works installation as an example of a pioneer species specialised in that ecosystem. It thrives on the harsh semi-arid shingle banks. I wanted to create a form expressive of the plant’s resilience and abundance on the edge of things.
I worked on these contextual studies months in advance as soon as I had the brief. I prepared the architectural drawings required to secure a larger budget and the engineering support needed. These studies and RHNR helped secure permission for a temporary institution next to the beach at Rye Harbour. Throughout this process, I worked closely with the Climate Art Team, who had secured the production budget (kindly provided by the Kowitz Family Foundation) and made it possible for me to collaborate with the team at AKT II, a London design-led engineering firm. I found myself in the last months of lockdown working directly with world-class engineers AKT II to finalise the bamboo design so that the materials could be ordered in time.
It was an incredibly challenging environment to build a 20m wide temporary structure where 50 mph winds are not unusual. Luckily, my initial tower design stood up to scrutiny, and I supplied the engineers with a detailed digital model. They calculated wind loads and designed appropriate connections for the bamboo, which was a feat in its own right, considering bamboo had never been used in this way in the UK before.
I single-handedly fabricated The Beacon from bamboo columns and sewn fabric panels over two months in a warehouse in Rock Channel, Rye, which was offered as part of the Climate Art residency. I then transported and assembled the work on the beach over two weeks. I was pleased to say The Beacon has been longlisted in the installation design category of the prestigious Dezeen Awards 2022.
“These projects have a quick turnaround from concept; you start making it and build it all within several months; then, in no time, you see people interacting with the finished piece.”
When The Beacon was up, the school kids were using it as an outdoor classroom, and they were loving it. I did some camp-building workshops for charity
and a local beach school. I watched children putting their faces through the gaps and running around the space. I knew where those kids’ minds were at.
After The Beacon, I was contacted by Sue from Art Romney Marsh to design and construct bamboo frames to support works by five outstanding British contemporary artists for the exhibition called Breathing Out. So that was something completely different.
Then The Beacon of Hope, the 8m tall central tower element of that original, The Beacon, was relocated to AKT II’s headquarters at White Collar Factory, as part of the London Design Festival. This was a great opportunity to do an installation in a city environment.
While this was going on, I reached out to the festival industry, as I knew this sort of temporary structure had a lot of potential in that environment. Last year Boomtown Festival commissioned three Nomadic Temples based on The Beacon. I redesigned it with a 25m wide, fully waterproof stretch canopy. Again, I fabricated all the bamboo elements and decorative panels in Rye.
The 10m high central tower is hand lashed with each new build, binding in crafted energy. During the day, its’ semi-transparent facets catch the sun to form an illuminated towering vault within. At night, it becomes a beacon of tessellating geometric light.
Twenty twenty three is the second year I have been working with a crew to construct my temples across the UK and, recently, in the EU. I have enjoyed seeing it house the main stage at Love Jam Festival and thousands of ravers at Rampage, for example.
Alongside the Boomtown project, Hastings Country Park was looking for something for the upcoming Jubilee weekend. I collaborated with Groundworks at Hastings Country Park to build three sculptures called Hay Stooks. One was a 6m tall, pink, orchid-shaped basket woven from bamboo splits that people could crawl in like insects. This project also involved a program where we managed a nearby meadow with the help of the Ground Works volunteers. We cut the meadow with scythes at the end of the summer and turned it into Hay Stooks, which still act as habitats sculpted by the wind and rains.
Working with community artist Morey Bean to design and install the Peace Portal this year was a massive privilege. It was a theatre pod designed to highlight indigenous people in the Boulder, Colorado region via screened media. Locally, I have designed and built two outdoor classrooms, one at Hastings Country Park and another at Rye Harbour Nature Reserve.
I’m now looking to site an outdoor workshop space that can be set up in a rural location or empty barn. I hope to stay based locally and find a place to trial this new phase. The location would allow me to continue my bamboo projects and investigate the use of local unpressed timber poles in my tensile art works.
Joseph Williams
bamboology.co.uk
Instagram. bamboo.logy