Dystopia to Harmony (A Journey):

Jacob Chandler’s As You Like It Installation

Remarks of contributors at the Private View

There is an important art exhibition at Soulton between 14 and 17 November. It includes open public access on the Saturday and Sunday as explained in the link just given.

Jacob Chandler, Artist

The private view on the Friday will include some speeches, the speaking notes of which are reproduced below so they are more widely available.

Remarks from Jacob Chandler, the artist

My Lord Lieutenant, Ladies and Gentlemen: Good evening.

I appreciate you attending this event, which is my first installation and the premier of my latest body of work.

Thanks also go out to the Ashton family who have most kindly given us access to this wonderful location and has inducted me into the fabulous history associated with the Manor, which has been the inspiration for my analysis of Shakespeare’s As You Like it.

The chaos and dystopia of the usurped court from which the good characters flee is shown in the exhibition, which incorporates a sculpture retrospective.

This installation guides the viewer through the dystopian early acts of As You Like It, where the court is a place of conflict and betrayal, through to The Forest of Arden. This magical place is a transformative space, where love and forgiveness heal the fractures created by the court’s dystopia, bringing the characters to a place of unity and peace.

I placed my sculptures from the “Moments in time” body of work, within this dystopia as these pieces discuss the danger of relying on the inherently fragile human body, to provide self identity. They chronicle my own physical and emotional destruction at the hands of a genetic disease, Ehlers Danlos Syndrome and colitis, which ravaged my health and sense of self. Through sublimation, at this time in my career, I explored the illusion of physical perfection. All the poses captured are caught on the edge of losing balance. This mirrors the court’s precarious condition at the beginning of the play.

My small “Explorations of Flatlands” are placed in this dystopia as glimmers of hope, which is realised, when one sees the transfigured As You Like It characters, in the Harmony of the Forest of Arden.

The Flatlands body of work was inspired by the novel Flatland by Edwin Abbott. This Victorian social satire seems forever poignant and I see it as a metaphor for how hard it is for people who have been polarised, to adjust their thinking and see things from a healthy perspective. Standing back from the relief sculptures allows one to perceive the subject of the composition more clearly but if you look at it from the side it appears as a series of lines, the two views appear to have nothing in common, unless you invest the energy to look at things from both points of view and find the common ground. This is a reworking of Plato’s cave where silhouettes cast from the light of a fire belie the complexity of a human being. I hope to pursue this on a larger scale, where people can physically experience this transition as it seems to be a reflection of society today.

Jacob Chandler’s AS YOU LIKE IT dancers in the Moot Hall, Soulton Hall

The characters in As You Like It start in turmoil; they explore their own identity within the forest of Arden and eventually find themselves and marital happiness.

Rowland Hill, the once owner of Soulton Hall, was Lord Mayor of London, publisher of the Geneva Bible in 1560 and cousin of Shakespeare’s mother Mary Arden. He similarly navigated dangerous unbalanced times, In his case when the country reeled from protestant to catholic and back to protestant. Such was the turmoil of the times that a protestant priest hole was required to protect Queen Elizabeth I’s godfather within the main hall.

Indeed the very room in which we stand was a court room which even presided over a witch trial. (I am happy to say in this place Harmony prevailed).

When Tim Aston commissioned me I was charged with capturing not just the transformation of the characters within the play but to allude to the significant history of the hall. No small task! But I’ll try to explain how I aimed to fulfil this brief.

The visual that most captured my imagination from the play was that of love struck Orlando hanging his poems to Rosalind, in the trees of the forest of Arden. This is where the idea to hang the large prints came from.

The hanging battens symbolically reference the trees and have been constructed from oak, kindly provided by Lord Barnard and sourced from within Shropshire’s ancient forest of Arden.

The plugs at the bottom of the pieces correlate to show which characters wed. The darker more prominent plugs are from an ancient beam sourced from Old Sir Roland’s Soulton hall by kind permission of Tim Ashton. They pay homage to the dance seal of the estate, which features five light sections and three darker ones and Hill’s coded messages evident within The Hall.

The choice of a black and white colour theme was chosen to draw a parallel with the Tudor buildings and particularly with The Globe. I resisted the temptation to print the pieces in a solid uniform black and rather embraced the variance possible when the ink is applied more sparingly. Each print, in this way is unique This hand printing technique is also more reminiscent of the early printing techniques that Shakespeare’s contemporaries and those printing the Geneva Bible would have been familiar with.

My latest iteration on this theme sees the characters represented in the flatlands style. Reinforcing that true harmony can only be achieved when one considers the whole picture. Not allowing polarisation.

I chose a reflective finish, making the viewer and the surroundings part of the piece, illustrating my belief that only when one has respect for oneself and one’s environment can one reach self enlightenment. This is also part of my take, on As You Like It’s message.

This body of work was created as I publicity and personally faced my own disability, the force that had thrown my life into disarray but through it I have now found a new identity, using my arts platform to raise awareness of hidden disabilities and becoming ambassador for EDS UK.

Accepting rather than fighting and denying my disability was difficult but working with Ben Pearson, the bladed athlete, to produce the Commonwealth sculpture on Birmingham New St in 2022 provided me with insights into my own condition. It was my Forest of Arden.”