Tipperary artist John Gerrard is setting the art world alight, writes Gemma Tipton
Is this the future of art? A tree stands in an Irish landscape, its twigs and branches gently smoking. The smoke lingers darkly before diffusing into the atmosphere. Around the tree, afternoon turns to evening and evening to night. It sounds like a strange sort of a film, but it is actually a work of art, the kind that comes in a frame. And although it is made with cutting-edge Real-Time 3D technology, it is also the kind of art you could imagine having in your home. Move the frame and the scene moves, allowing you to see the tree from all sides. It is very beautiful - and real in a way that is also mesmerisingly unreal.
Smoke Tree is what John Gerrard, its creator, calls sculptural photography. The original tree stands in Tipperary, where Gerrard grew up and where he still spends time in his family home. He spends the rest of his life in Dublin, where he has a studio; in Vienna, where he makes his work; and on aircraft, attending exhibitions and art fairs around the world. I first saw Smoke Tree at Pulse art fair, in New York, earlier this year. A crowd had gathered around it, looking, moving the frame - and also buying. Within an hour of the opening, Smoke Tree (in an edition of six) had sold out.
A director of one of New York's major museums was disappointed; another museum had snapped up the last one. And then there was a waiting list for whatever the artist was going to make next. Things happen like that at art fairs: there is a buzz, reputations are made, artists are launched on seemingly overnight paths to stardom. But it isn't usually overnight, and, for Gerrard, Pulse, and an earlier art fair, in Miami, were just the moments when the world's influential art collectors began to take note of his work.
It all seems a world away from Gerrard's Tipperary home, an old square Irish country house. I spoke to him when he was just back from Seoul, where he had work in the Korean Biennale (and just before he headed off to Turin, for an exhibition of his art there). But if Gerrard's life seems to be a nonstop flight, there is something timeless and still about the works that he makes, even though the medium is so futuristic. In the buzzing halls of the Pulse fair, Smoke Tree was mapping the passing of time in Tipperary, set to an Irish rhythm of day and night.
Back in Tipperary, there is less concern about fixing a sense of past and future. An old Rayburn stove sits beside a newer oven, a new Apple sits on a dark wood table of indeterminate age, and contemporary art hangs beside darker, older landscapes. Outside, in one of the sheds, there are still bits and pieces from Gerrard's first studio, where he put together the detritus of machines to create fantastic objects; nowadays he sculpts on a computer.
In the livingroom, portraits of ancestors (both Gerrard's and other people's) hang on the walls. It is a cosy room, filled with family memories from Gerrard's parents, who live there, from his five sisters and from his brother, who died three years ago. Gerrard talks about the mourning that came into his art afterwards, as he began to work with images of people. They seem alive in his portraits. Some respond to your touching the screen, one (Mary) smiles just once a year, another (Caroline) tracks the sun with her eyes, but none of them will ever grow old.
Smoke Tree, on the other hand, is dying. The smoke comes from the idea of carbon dioxide being given off by the tree instead of the usual oxygen. It seems to be set in some future place where trees gently pollute the air instead of cleaning it. And during the course of between 200 and 300 years - the lifespan of the trees used in the different Smoke Trees - each tree will decay and fall, leaving the image of a dead tree in the still landscape of the picture's frame.
Perhaps his work has an impact because, although Gerrard uses new technology, the things he depicts - trees, landscapes, portraits of people - are subjects that art history has been looking at for hundreds of years.
Christiane Paul, a curator at New York's Whitney Museum of American Art, has said that Gerrard is redefining how we see traditional subjects for the digital age. This is one reason why he is among the few artists working in this new medium whose work is so highly collectable.
Not everybody gets it, however. Not everybody gets over the technology to really look at what Gerrard is looking at - which seems to me to be as daft as marvelling over the size of the block of marble when looking at Michelangelo's David or to get hung up on how Botticelli mixed his blues for La Primavera.
But how much do you need to know in order to love a work of art? One of the things that can put people off going into galleries is the idea that you can't have an opinion unless you also have a degree in art history and an intimate acquaintance with the ins and outs of the contemporary art world. Gerrard has a different opinion. "I want all sorts of people to see my work," he says. "And it seems to speak to people of all ages and backgrounds."
Gerrard's work is clever and challenging, and it can be irreverent, but, most of all, it can be fun. Something about it adds a sense of wonder and delight to the darker or more serious aspects of the things he is looking at. And that's a description that is particularly apt to describe Gerrard himself. This month an artist the whole world seems to be talking about finally comes back to Ireland - briefly, at least. So you can ask yourself if this is the future of art.
John Gerrard: Dark Portraits is at the Royal Hibernian Gallery, Dublin, from Friday until January 7th, 2007