The wicker man

As a genre, fantasy invites us to suspend belief, indulges our imaginations, and asks us to consider things differently than they are in our rational world. The test of any good work of fantasy is its capacity to inspire wonder in its audience.

Wonder permeates Bob Johnston’s work. From Bangor in Northern Ireland, Bob is a willow sculpture artist whose waiting list for commissioned pieces currently stands at a few years with the faux-taxidermy sculptures he is most well known taking over 100 hours to complete. These sculptures don’t merely resemble their animal subjects, Bob weaves life into these creatures. You immediately get a sense of the personality of his animal subjects and are able to give them a storyline and the idea of a life. The shaggy long haired canine, Ollie, looks like his tail has started to go after catching a whiff of a roast that’s freshly out of the oven. Let’s just hope he can’t reach the counter tops on his hind legs. On other hand, the brown bear appropriately named, Bearnado, looks just as surprised to see me and I am him. I have definitely wandered into the wrong part of the woods and must flee immediately.

Bob’s is a multi award winning artist and his work has been recognised by a range of other creative industries. The Triumph of Music was a collaboration with Jeremy Deller and The National Gallery;  fashion house Alexander McQueen featured Bob’s work in a recent advert and he is currently working on a commission for an exhibition about an iconic Irish novel, Marita Conlon-McKenna’s Under The Hawthorne Tree.

The willow, through Bob’s craft, transforms into beings bursting with character, feeling and motion. The natural, organic nature of the material also contributes to the feeling of the sculptures being of the earth and alive. Bob says the willow lends itself perfectly, adding “a sense of whimsy and imagination” to his work.

CS Lewis, writer of the Narnia books, often cited the countryside of County Down as a major inspiration for his fictional world. Bob’s practice has been based here for the past 25 years and his sculptures bring to mind the courtyard of the White Witch Jadis, where creatures unfortunate enough to have found themselves on the wrong end of her wand are turned into statues, left frozen mid-motion.

County Down just so happens to be the same place that I grew up in. Coming from this part of the world, I am acutely aware that the path to becoming a world-renowned artist is not exactly a well-trodden one. So how did Bob get to where he is? Bob’s story is one of building blocks, mastering one sequential creative discipline after another.

He says that he was always creative and grew up experimenting with a range of crafts from pottery to wood turning. After leaving school he trained as a textile weaver. It was then, at a weekend basketry beginners course, that he realised that basket making and textile weaving were very similar concepts: “It’s an interlacement of fibre, just a different type of fibre.” He became obsessed with traditional basketry styles and techniques. After being asked to make willow animal sculptures for a sensory garden in a special needs school, the work was exhibited, won a prize, and the demand for his sculptural work took off. He credits the intricate knowledge he acquired in traditional basket with being the base that allowed him to innovate and experiment with his willow sculpture.

I was first introduced to Bob’s work through a visit to The Ulster Museum many years ago. Here, the subject matter on display was more explicitly fantastical. Suspended from the atrium of the building were three floating willow dragons. They acted as a centre piece in the central staircase that connected different floors and exhibits. Of all the history, facts and art on display that day it was the spectacle of these beasts that stuck with me.

This work was commissioned by HBO in 2019 for the release of the final season of the fantasy behemoth, Game of Thrones, alongside a willow sculpture of the Iron Throne. This work has since gone on to have a life in public spaces across Northern Ireland. HBO kindly donated the dragons to the Ulster Museum where they are still exhibited today. The Iron Throne, however, now resides in Belfast International Airport- greeting visitors to Northern Ireland and encouraging them to visit the 25 GOT filming locations across the region. Bob says that he still receives messages daily about the dragons and loves to see images online of people being photographed beside the throne as they arrive and depart from the country.

Whilst writing this piece, I realised I needed to see some of Bob’s work up close again. So I made my way into the city centre, through the botanical gardens, and up to the museum. From the ground floor I saw three monstrous beings elevated high above, almost like they’d been frozen mid-flight. I was reminded of just how much of a marvel they are in unison.

When I emerged from the lift on the top floor, I took my spot at the perfect vantage point on the staircase and the mastery of Bob’s craft quickly became apparent. The dragon’s in the details. The double fork in their tongues, exposed by snarling snouts. The tighter weave that was used to create their horns, which creates a more solid texture when compared to that of their sinewy bodies. The thicker willow that’s been used to sculpt the thighs of their legs, giving the illusion of a terrifying physical strength. No matter how many times I studied the dragons I continued to find a new stroke of genius in the design each time. You almost have to remind yourself that you’re looking at a work of fiction. It would be easy to believe that these are true to life anatomical models of creatures discovered by Darwin himself.

Over the 15 minutes or so I spent interrogating these magnificent sculptures, I watched three different groups of people stop on the staircase to examine them and take pictures. I became a voyeur to wonderfully private moments: strangers suspended for a minute in unselfconscious wonder.

I left the museum that day with an even greater appreciation for Bob’s work. He tells me that after sketching and working out technical challenges involved with a particular sculpture, he begins “to dissect the design into several component parts, treating each part as a sculpture in its own right.” This is most evident when you’re just a stone's throw from his work where it’s clear that he is not just an artist but an engineer. Quality of the final product is something he’s unwilling to compromise on. He says that it’s not unusual for him to go through multiple iterations of a sculpture until it matches the vision he has in his head. He’s unafraid to discard days of work if he feels he hasn’t quite got it right. This is an artist who refuses to rest on his laurels and continues to hone his craft: “Every single (sculpture) is unique and born from the experience of its predecessor.”

Speaking with Bob, I began to increasingly understand an intimacy that exists between him and the material that he works with. He grows over 40 different varieties of willow himself. For him, the decision to do so was born of necessity. He refused to be restricted to the limited selection of varieties offered by commercial willow growers. Take his favourite variety, Salix Nagricans, as an example. He says that because it has a more branchy quality it is often overlooked by commercial growers. Bob, however, describes it having a “fabulous glossy black” colour and “uses it in most sculptures as it provides detail and contrast.”

He grows the willow from cuttings in the soil and takes it all the way to finished sculpture. His fingerprints can be found across every process that brings about his fantastic creations. He has a deep connection to, and revere for, his chosen material: “Willow is fast growing, sustainable, wonderfully forgiving, beautifully coloured with stunning texture. You can almost draw with the material.” It is this intimate knowledge and awareness of the potential of willow that gives his work such a painterly quality. Willow isn’t just a vessel by which to express his ideas, but can act as a source of inspiration itself. He says that “sometimes the colour, size and quality of the material suggests a subject.”

Another branch of Bob’s creative output is his mummer masks. These are masks that have been worn in Ireland for centuries for dramatic performances. This traditional practice allowed people to disappear into roles. As Bob puts it: “In a small village where everyone knew everyone else, the mask enabled the wearer to act the fool.” He creates masks for the Armagh Rhymers, a world famous Irish folk drama ensemble. Most of their plays draw on Irish myths or legends. With so much of folklore intersecting with fantasy, we see a further way in which his work plays in this space. He says with mummer masks he uses willow “to create the twisted expressions and organic contours of myths, characters and legends.”

Bob is an artist equal parts master of his discipline and visionary. He is a true artisan, taking a local material and a local culture to create worldclass items.