Sculptor Gives New Meaning to the Mundane : Art: Chairs, ladders and washtubs provide some of the fodder for Richard Wentworth’s contradictory creations.

Richard Wentworth didn’t talk much about his art during a recent two-hour interview, but he really didn’t need to. The motivations for his work unfurled on their own in the course of a conversation about travel, landscape, comfort, expectations and the mechanics of conversation itself.

Wentworth, 43, left his “dinosaur of a studio” in London’s financial district last month to work in a spare, 1,000-square-foot warehouse near the Miramar Naval Air Station. He is the third artist--after New Yorker Gary Lang and fellow Briton Eric Snell to come to San Diego to participate in an unusual artist-in-residence enterprise called Quint/Krichman Projects.

Mark Quint, a local dealer in contemporary art, and his partner, attorney Michael Krichman, began the program earlier this year. Each artist they invite stays in a small La Jolla cottage for one month and works in the Miramar space. At the end of the residency, the warehouse becomes a gallery for the artist’s finished work, and the public is invited to view the show by appointment.

Wentworth’s show opened Saturday and continues through the end of the year. Two Polish artists and a Dutch and a German are scheduled for residencies during the coming year.

Wentworth, a sculptor whose work comments coyly on the idiosyncrasies of place and behavior, arrived in San Diego with no work in hand and no set plans.

“I thought it was more truthful,” he said. “It’s more risky. I could schedule a month’s work very easily, and I think it would probably have some interest, but it feels slightly immoral. It feels pointless. Why come here and sit under this (the roar of the Miramar jets) and not try to be a bit more responsive?”

As the blanket of white noise lifted and descended, smothering the conversation, then sucking it in new directions, Wentworth spoke of the veracity of using materials and ideas in their own context. Shopping at the swap meet and a Santee depot--something akin to an indoor swap meet--has felt “like checking out the culture’s digestive system,” he said.

Like a number of British sculptors of his generation, including Tony Cragg (whose work is the subject of a major retrospective currently at the Newport Harbor Art Museum) and Bill Woodrow, Wentworth fashions his work primarily out of humble everyday objects. Chairs, ladders, washtubs and drinking glasses appear often, but only after he has rendered these familiar forms slightly unfamiliar and playfully negated their function.

In his show last year at Mark Quint’s La Jolla exhibition space, he made solid objects appear sinuous, and the inanimate seem alive by soldering three steel washtubs together in a squirming line and titling the work “Eel.” For the current show, he has enrobed a tall steel ladder in a skirt of wire mesh, calling attention to the nature of an object usually taken for granted.

“Ladders are quite comical,” he said. “When they’re necessary, they’re very necessary, and when you don’t need them, they’re incredibly irritating--where do you put them?”

He has also mounted a pair of crutches high on opposite walls, one of them upside down. Normally used to recover from a disaster, Wentworth’s crutches seem to be part of the calamity itself. His title for the work “Magnet” refers to the tense attraction between the separated objects and makes a private pun on the Italian word for magnet, calamita.

A spirit of contradiction, thwarted expectation and humorous defiance characterizes all of Wentworth’s work, which has its roots in the keen observation of human behavior as well as the shifting sensibilities of 20th-Century British sculpture.

Trained as a sculptor at Hornsey College of Art and the Royal College of art, both in London, Wentworth is also a photographer. He uses the camera to record arrangements of objects brought together by chance or by the unspoken procedures that govern our actions, that dictate, for example, that an interviewer’s notebook belongs on her lap while her purse hangs from the back of the chair, and not vice-versa.

“Broadly, if you look at the world that humans operate in, they mimic nature. Very occasionally you find a rock balanced on the wrong edge, but for the most part, the landscape is completely coherent. Everything is of an order. Underneath all of our formality and our manners, we are very like that. Essentially, that’s what I took photographs of.

“In its extreme form, it was the way people would resolve a predicament, precisely when the formal, normal method wasn’t available to them,” such as in his 1979 photograph of a damaged car fender, patched with a remnant of carpet.

“There was a very slow recognition,” he said, “that this is what I see all the time.”

The snapshots and written notes pinned to the walls of the Miramar warehouse bear evidence of that continuing fascination with the eccentric, the poetic, the extraordinary in the ordinary. In one photograph, two coat hangers on the pavement appear to the artist “sympathetic to each other,” one hooked on the shadow of the other. The image hangs near the words pirate and overnight , inscribed in all their simplicity and potency on individual pieces of paper.

Wentworth’s love of “subcutaneous contradiction and rhyme” drew him to the work of the American photographer Walker Evans, whose images of vernacular architecture and signage were made in the 1930s. But the possibility of exploring such a concept in sculpture was laid open to Wentworth’s generation by several preceding generations of British and American artists.

“We all grew up knowing a lot about Minimalism, and I think that did impress us,” he said. “That seemed like clearing the decks, intellectually. That was followed by quite diverse Conceptualism, and that’s the climate we were students in, in the late ‘60s, early ‘70s.”

Around the same time, in 1967, Wentworth worked as an artisan for Henry Moore, mixing plaster in the sculptor’s busy, business-like studio. Wentworth believes Moore gave sculpture back its dignity, and it was just that loftiness that following generations of British sculptors found “impossible.”

The modest materials and familiar forms that Wentworth uses are highly accessible, but they are only the raw material for a playful, subversive art that ends up questioning assumptions more than confirming them.

Wentworth sees parallels in his work to alchemy, the ancient practice of turning base metals into precious ones.

“The aspect of alchemy that I really like is when you see it in children,” he said, “when you see them insist that something is something else. They can run a whole world around that.

“In a way, that’s probably all that artists do. Everybody can do it, but a lot of people just give up on doing it because they think they’d better be grown-up. But most of our lives actually revolve around fantasy, around daydreams and night dreams and projections. It seems that one might as well own up to it and go with it, really.”

To make an appointment to view the show, call 454-3409.