Letter from London: Barry Flanagan’s Wake

Someone recently watched a film I was lucky enough to make about the late artist and sculptor Barry Flanagan. They asked me how the idea came about and I told them that 16 years ago I was travelling from Kabul to Helmand via Kandahar and Camp Bastion on my way to Lashkar Gah, staring out of a Chinook at a dry universe unimproved in the end by any of the Western weapons and soldiers there. I said I had been dreaming not only of a safe return to my young family in London but of finding a long-term project that had nothing to do with war.

I travelled with my family to Paris where outside our hotel stood this tall, mysterious Barry Flanagan sculpture. As I knew Barry, I made a note to tell him of this coincidence once back in London. Before I did, however, Barry got in touch, ominously saying he had just been diagnosed with motor neurone disease. I felt so bad for him. He said he wanted to lunch with me at The Ivy and hear all about Afghanistan. I was more concerned about him than the latest promise of more troops for Afghanistan.

Over dessert with Barry and his partner Jessica, I discussed the idea of filming a kind of picaresque homage, visiting as many of his public works as possible, speaking to lots of different people. Barry took to this and promptly introduced me to gallerist Leslie Waddington for a breakdown of their different locations worldwide. At Barry’s nearby hotel on Regent Street, I met his son Alfred, and spent the rest of the week reading up on the many books given me by Leslie Waddington, before Barry departed with Jessica back to Ibiza where they lived.

Official filming began in Wiltshire at the Barry Flanagan exhibition at Roche Court, where friends, family and collectors gathered in Barry’s absence. As a filmmaker more used to hostile environments at the time, I hid behind my kit, quietly recording Barry’s legacy, while flitting from work to work and person to person like a grasshopper with a lens. A second visit was made to Roche Court with Shakespearian actor Peter Hamilton-Dyer who let me film him down a long country lane by two giant bronze hares seven meters high. Another day in Cambridge, I filmed late poet John James, a friend of Barry’s who recalled them both working at a local Bristol bakery in their youth and Barry ‘sculpting’ the dough. He even described him as shamanistic. This was followed at with an interview, also in Cambridge, with writer, pilot, organist and academic Michael Bywater by Barry’s well loved San Marco Horse in a wisteria-clad First Court at Jesus College.

The film found its feet. Next up was a trip to the US for the first time since I lived there for five years in the 1980s. I met up with gallerist Paul Kasmin and picked up on our 25 year-old conversation about Bruce Chatwin. The next day I shot and interviewed writer Adrian Dannatt who was recounting bumping into Barry in New York one late summer night while Adrian was wearing pyjamas and a dressing gown in the street after popping out to post some letters. I travelled south to Washington DC to the National Gallery where I discovered Barry to be Hillary Clinton’s favourite artist.

It was as good a moment as any to travel to Ibiza with my family to see and film Barry, and to show my loosely edited footage from across the Atlantic. I filmed him viewing this first batch. Unfortunately Barry’s speech had deteriorated badly. His movements were much slower. But his mind was sharp as a silver dart. Poignantly, he communicated on camera with handwritten notes— ‘It’s a bugger!’—which I also filmed. Even the loops of his lettering felt oddly substantial. One day we visited his second Ibizan home deep in olive-green countryside where he suggested my family enjoy a swim in the pool. I was too busy filming but was made by Barry to promise to swim there next time I visited. ‘Naked,’ I joked. He laughed.

Filming continued. In Belgium after Ghent, I was on my way to the dunes in Knokke-Heist to capture the holidaying activities of tourists around one of Barry’s vast hare sculptures there. This was at the sight of a former World War Two gun emplacement that had once pointed to England. I was next in Strasbourg. In Madrid, I met an Australian, a former soldier, who so gelled with Barry’s work outside the British Council that he planted his face in front of the camera one time with two raised thumbs and a brazen message for Barry: ‘Go Bazza!’ he said. ‘You’re a good bloke!’ I was then all of a sudden in Dublin, a city dear to Barry’s heart. His work was everywhere.

I returned to the US for a filmed road journey through the midwest. I was driven by underground writer Peter Nolan Smith. It was like having Neal Cassady at the wheel. After Chicago, we took in Barry’s public works in St Louis, Kansas City, Des Moines, Minneapolis, then Chicago again. Native American reservations were visited. The spirit of the hare was matched with the freedom of the buffalo. Fireworks were purchased and let off in Barry’s honour in the middle of nowhere. We ate doggy-bags of cold ribs by wild rivers. We were stopped one time by a polite state trooper and plans were made for a further trip to the West coast. I was quietly planning on Japan and Armenia too.

The important backdrop to all this however was Barry’s worsening health. The film became a race against time. I badly wanted Barry to see this homage. Academic and curator Jo Melvin pointed me in the direction of Venice where I filmed two curiously organic marble works of Barry’s in the Peggy Guggenheim Collection next. But I was by now feeling oddly restless. It was not just the swine flu. I had this rotten feeling in my gut. In fact, as soon as I returned to London I heard Barry had died.

I filmed the memorial service on Ibiza, the wake afterwards too, where I fulfilled my secret promise to Barry to swim naked in the pool. Finally, I made one last trip to Paris, where I interviewed a more introspective Adrian Dannatt this time. He was outside the hotel where I had stayed with my family. I eventually finished the edit. A director’s cut was selected by the Irish International Film Festival in Dublin. It showed at various film festivals in the end. The BBC bought it and changed the name to The Man Who Sculpted Hares—Barry Flanagan, A Life. (I had called it Flanagan’s Wake.) Barry never did get to see it. Maybe you can see it for him. As the Australian said, he was good bloke.

The director’s cut of Peter Bach’s film Flanagan’s Wake is available for free on YouTube

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