He may not have got it off the ground, but Mark Clews’s hand-built plane, designed as a full-scale replica of a children’s toy model, has by no means failed in its goal either. Commissioned as part of a solo art show entitled Learn to Fly, the mixed media piece is now on view at London Gallery West and proving a great success.
Clews, aged 24, and a Fulham resident, received a first-class honours degree from University of Westminster’s BA Mixed Media Fine Art course in 2004. It took six months to construct the full-scale version of the balsa wood, rubber band-powered airplane of his childhood. Then in October, he attempted to fly it at Dunsford Aerodrome in Surrey, and if it hadn’t have been a rainy, windy day, Clews is convinced the plane would have soared along the runway.
"I’d always fancied the thought of flying and it’s such a great gallery space that it’s the first opportunity I’d had to do something on such a big scale," says Clews, preparing for the opening, while suffering with a bad cough. "I thought I’d take it and go for the biggest thing I could do."
The idea stemmed from his childhood love of model airplanes. A quick search on eBay found one as close in similarity to the balsa wood toys of back then. "I took it all apart, measured all the dimensions and worked out I needed to scale it up 20 times the size. I literally copied it with only a couple of alterations, like widening the cockpit so I could sit in it," he says.
For the propeller, no elastic could be found large enough for such a feat, so he used bungee cord – "which actually created a lot of power, so that was good". Using balsa wood was never going to work on such a large scale either, so he found a tougher wood. And, like the model version, it can be flat-packed and reassembled anywhere in under an hour, ready for flight. With a wingspan of 20 feet and powered by 50 metres of wound rubber, the plane can in theory fly up to 2,700 feet. But on the day of reckoning, would it reach lift-off?
"I didn’t really know what was going to happen," says Clews, talking about the trial flight day. "It was really exciting, but I was nervous, too. It was quite a windy day, which pushed the plane backwards at one point. The weather ended up getting so bad we had to stop after two attempts, so we never really got the elastic wound up tight enough to really get going."
Mark Clews’s work largely deals with escapism, adventure and the inevitable failure of childhood fantasy. A previous trilogy, The Great Escape (2003-2004), came from similar themes. "I made all these paper sculptures, chasing childhood things – a paper plane, paper sail boat, and a paper helicopter; things that work really well when small. I scaled them up large enough so I could sail the paper boat and jump off a cliff with a paper helicopter – and that’s how I started the whole escapism thing."
When it came to the final degree show, Clews suddenly found himself at a dead end, so to speak. "I really felt I wanted to get out of the studio, so my tutor told me not to stress and to go on holiday, which I did. I ended up watching The Great Escape, one of my favourite films, while I was away. When I got back after Easter, I said to my tutor: ‘Can I dig a hole in the studio floor?’ He thought I was joking, but after a bit of persuasion, they let me. So I built a World War II prisoner of war escape tunnel in my studio space at college. It went six feet down but only 20 feet across. I’d planned it to be 50 feet but I ran out of time, so it kind of failed, and I didn’t escape," he says, with a smile. What next for this escape artist? "Not sure, I’m going to take a month or two off to recover first." Keep your eyes out for odd holes in walls and strange flying apparatus.
Learn to Fly, an exhibition of sculpture, performance, video, photography and painting, showcases the plane alongside documentation of the attempted flight and a specially commissioned mock-heroic portrait of Clews flying the plane. It is being held at the University of Westminster’s London Gallery West in Harrow (020 7911 5000 ext. 4774)