At his new studio on a former military airfield, James Capper designs kinetic sculptures powered by hydraulics
James Capper recently moved his studio from Bermondsey to what used to be RAF Wroughton, a military airfield in Wiltshire that is now an outpost of the Science Museum. Capper is in the old fire station, which may not be at the gigantic scale of Wroughton’s original hangars, built to handle the 100-foot wingspan of Lancaster bombers, three at a time, but it is certainly big enough to reflect the industrial scale of his work. And it makes manoeuvring a forklift truck easier.
Over the last 15 years, Capper has built a series of what the critic Richard Cork once described as “self-propelled sculptures,” beginning with a piece called Tread Toe in 2010. It’s a work fabricated from steel I-beams painted bright yellow. At each end there is a pair of legs connected by a runner. Positioned between them is a motorised hydraulic arm welded to a third steel runner. Cork watched as Capper clambered up into the sculpture, manoeuvred himself into the control cabin, and started the engine. He pulled a lever, and the hydraulics punched the central arm down into the earth with enough force to lift the whole piece off the ground, propelling it a few feet forward. He repeated the manoeuvre, and Tread Toe lurched a bit further forward. Each jump left a distinct trace on the ground, which is why Capper assigns it to what he calls his ‘Earth Marking Division’.
Tread Toe is a piece that works on multiple levels. Its assemblage of steel I-beams uses the vocabulary of Antony Caro’s sculpture in his period of classical abstraction. It can also be understood as a performance piece. And then there are the ephemeral traces it leaves behind as it moves. His Rotary Paintings series reverses the emphasis to make permanent marks on paper. Like Tread Toe, these paintings are the product of a specially designed and fabricated hydraulic mechanism. They are the result of a performance that starts when Capper switches on the machine and distributes industrial marine paint in standard RAL colours in concentric rings.
He has been working with the Hydra Painter – a hydraulic painting machine – on these artworks since 2015. Some of them were the subject of an exhibition that, unlike marks in the mud left by Tread Toe, could be comfortably accommodated in the pristine setting of the Albion Jeune Gallery in London.
There is another aspect to Capper’s work, hinted at by his use of the word ‘division’, that refuses to be constrained by the confines of any gallery. He has designed and built several other earth-marking machines that use a variety of steel blades and claws. There is also what he calls an ‘offshore division,’ of which the most substantial expression so far is the Mudskipper, a 14.5-ton, nine-metre-long boat that has been retrofitted to allow it to walk.
In the summer of 2021, Capper sailed it up the Thames from Battersea Power Station towards the Royal Docks and demonstrated the ability of its twin hydraulic jacks, each equipped with a circular tread pad foot, to lift the boat out of the water and make its way up the mud banks. “Have you seen Fitzcarraldo?” he asks me, referring to Werner Herzog’s epic film from 1982 that has Klaus Kinski playing the part of a rubber prospector hauling an ocean steamship through the Peruvian jungle. Capper spent 18 months on the project which, at times, was almost as demanding.
The rest of the offshore division’s products are even more ambitious, though they are still at the research and development stage. They include turning a bulk carrier into a sunken power plant. Then there is the aviation division, which speculates about heavy lift helicopters, and the ski-mounted Aero Cab which he tested on the ski slopes at Verbier. “I am less of a formal sculptor and more of a speculative engineer,” Capper says. He has spent enough time working with cars to understand exactly what is happening to an engine, but he is also the product of the art school system, having studied at Chelsea College of Arts and the Royal College of Art.
Structuring his work into divisions reflects his wider ambitions; his work is about more than the individual objects. It made me think of the architect Jan Kaplický, whose early practice with Future Systems speculated about houses transported by helicopters, inflatable structures, and robotic manufacturing. Capper knows and admires his work, but he refers more to Robert Gilmour LeTourneau, who was a prolific inventor of huge earth-moving equipment. With wheels 12 feet high designed for off-road use, they looked more like fantastical mechanical creatures than commercial products. But he was able to turn his ideas into a large industrial corporation.
Capper’s projects depend on hydraulics-based systems which is, by most measures, an old technology, whereby mechanical movement is produced by pumping liquid through hydraulic cylinders to move pistons. But Capper is also fascinated by evolving technologies. He is working on an autonomous tree planter, using seed drills built into a six-legged, electrically powered hydraulic machine, charged off a solar array that would use artificial intelligence to place saplings.
Capper works in a way that uses the practices of an industrial designer. He makes forensic drawings of complex mechanisms, each designed with a specific purpose. They have a functional as well as an aesthetic aspect and are the starting point for Capper’s iterative design process. Capper loses patience with suggestions that he is simply welding together pieces of recycled agricultural equipment. They will become a set of manufacturing instructions for Capper and his collaborators to produce prototypes and subassemblies. These are carefully planned and considered objects. The visual resonances go beyond machinery; Capper’s work with claws and beaks and flippers has zoomorphic characteristics. The idea of a boat walking out of the water is a kind of reflection on evolution.
Capper calls the divisions “Idea Fields,” and uses them as a conceptual framework to realise some projects without losing track of his wider ambitions. “Some fields move faster than others. If you divide them, you can cross-pollinate between fields, and use prototypes as sub-assemblies for larger pieces. What divisions do is keep the idea on the horizon.”
Photography Oskar Proctor
This article is taken from Port Issue 35. To continue reading, buy the issue or subscribe here
