For over 20 years Tony Plant has made work to be washed away. His works are as simple as coloured water, a track through snow, or a group of painted rocks – left to nature and passersby. These Guerrilla style installations, above and below the tidal zones of some of the most exposed coastal locations in the land, are purely ephemeral, and may be gone within a few waves, a tide or a storm, deliberately made to disappear.
"Tony Plant is an environmental artist, photographer and surf creature whose imagination stretches to the far and hidden corners of the coastline" - Surfers Path
Tony Plant
"Sometimes, walking along a high water line, kicking through seaweed, timber, plastics and rope, I'm really looking to find lost a painting by Peter Lanyon, Yves Klein or Trevor Bell"
Born in 1962, Tony Plant was educated and grew up in Cornwall; he remains based in Newquay on the north Cornish coast. Meeting environmental artist "Richard Long" in 1982 proved to be a catalyst. He bought a plane ticket, left everything behind and traveled. Passport, sketchbooks, rucksack, surfboard and camera.
Upon returning to the UK, in 1986 he enrolled at Chelsea School of Art, (tutor Roger Ackling), funding his way through his degree by living in squats and selling paintings, it was a seminal time for young artists in London: the movement later known as the "Young British Artists" (YBA's) were bustin' down the doors of the art establishment. Contemporaries at Chelsea included Gavin Turk, Franco B and Chris Offili. Graduating in 1990 Plant took his fine art painting degree and fled the parties, net working, galleries and warehouses of east London for the far reaches of Cornwall: "I just wanted to paint and create work, that's it, I couldn't be doing with all the rest of that stuff". He began placing colour, steelworks and paintings on cliff-tops and in coves along the coast of his Cornish home. Slowly, like a virus, word spreads.
"I decided against wasting energy and time waiting to be accepted or 'given permission' for my work to be involved in a project or situation. Much of my work is made at the edge of water and rock. People are drawn naturally to watery edges, to headlands, cliffs, hilltops and the spaces around. We see the landscape in front of us and we project ourselves forwards mentally, out into it. Sometimes, as I've swum or drawn and painted on some remote beach or rock formation I've seen figures breaking the horizon of the cliff top above, watching. Some have kept lookout for hours, others get up and continue after minutes, still more move on by without stopping at all. That trigger inside the viewer's head, the one which initiates the travel between the 2 points is something I'm interested in. Maybe it's a Cornish air thing, Lanyon flew into the storm, to gain a more complete knowledge of the landscape, to explore its edges, to be responsible for his own efforts, for his own survival, and I recognize that"
Peace.
Words: Matt Knight