1 When did you start to make art?
I’ve been making drawings and paintings on and off my whole life. When I was younger I would draw cartoons and paint toy soldiers, always covered in tiny details. Although none of this could be classed as Art, all the skills that I learnt in this time keep coming back. I still paint on a small scale and detail is very important to me, so I suppose the starting line is slightly blurred.
2 What drove you to make art as a professional vocation?
Before I started on my BA I used to work as a draftsman for Structural Engineers. It was a nine to five office job with low ceilings and florescent (often flickering) lights. There was a rule at the place I worked which was twenty, twenty, twenty. This meant look away from your computer screen every twenty minutes at something twenty feet away for twenty seconds or your eyes would get stressed! I think it was the absolute desperation at the thought of being stuck there forever that really focused me on what I wanted to achieve, and this crossed with a love of creative things pointed me the right direction.
4 Explain your inspiration?
I’m inspired by a lot of things, but mainly by philosophy and science. I was brought up a strict Christian and so ideas of religion interest me as well. I find it bizarre that all those different people through the ages tried to classify and explain the world. I don’t believe in any Met narratives and so I see all this stuff as quite absurd. I think it is this absurdness that I find fascinating. I once heard of a theory called Hollow Earth Theory which proposed that we lived on the inside skin of a giant sphere with the universe in the middle. So if you travelled directly upward from England you would travel through the whole cosmos and end up in Australia. The thing is that someone who was naive of the truths of science could have this as their whole world structure, but in the end it wouldn’t make much difference to their day to day life.
5 In what way does your inspiration transform into ideas?
My ideas are produced through research. Someone once told me that I was like a magpie collecting a lot of different ideas and methods and using them as my own. I have always liked this idea of gathering; Barthes said that nothing is created out of nothing. My ideas are formed from other ideas, interpretations of interpretations.
6 From Ideas to production of art – how? And why?
A sketch book is very important to me. I always have a pen and paper on me just encase an ideas comes. My sketch book is a mish mash of all sorts of things from ideas, quotes, artist names, writings and recipes for dinner. I constantly review and revise my ideas, waiting for the moment a piece can be made. There is nothing better than being in the studio having all the parts and making a piece. Of course most pieces don’t go to plan and so the whole process becomes a constant revision till the it feels right.
7 Could your ideas be portrayed in any other medium? If so which?
I am a painter at heart, but I like to keep this definition a bit blurred working in drawing, collage and sculpture. When I come up with ideas there is always the question of medium, in fact most of the time the medium comes first. It is a strange thing to separate the materiality of the work and the mental processes of the brain. For me knowing how to translate an idea into the right form is a very hard skill to master.
8 Which artists would you most like to blatantly rip off?
I’m really into Jamie Shovlin at the moment. I didn’t really know much about him till recently and I’ve been trying to gather all I can about him. The best thing about his work is the skill involved in it. I believe the best art is a good marriage between the act of making, the ideas involved and a little bit of whit and Shovlin’s got it all.
9 Why is your art made?
All of the things in my life have lead up to the work being made, all the people I’ve met, all the things I’ve seen. It even goes down to the tiniest details like my mother taking my sister and me to the Greenwich observatory every school holiday or having my appendix out. Everything just culminates into everything else.
10 What does being an artists mean to you?
An art tutor of mine used to refer to artists as cultural producers. I have heard this term battered around a bit and I think it fits well. It is an absurd position to be in, making work that reflects the culture you are in. Skill doesn’t mean much it art nowadays maybe it has been replace by a sensitivity to the world rather than a skill in representing it. Another term I heard recently on a podcast about poetry was intelligent agent; someone who shows themselves in the translation of one thing into something else. I have been thinking about this a lot recently.
11 Are you happy with your reasons for making art? i.e Are there any trade offs that make life hard?
I haven’t had to make any trade offs yet. There is always the question about money and whether to focus on that rather than the art itself, but I strongly believe the art making is the point.
12 When does your art become successful?
For me it is when the piece is completed and the thoughts behind it just keep coming. An artist (who will not be named) once told me to ‘make work and then make the bullshit up afterwards’, I think there is something in this. If you read enough it will eventually seep in, and no matter how hard you try to conjure it up while the piece is being made it won’t happen. After the piece is made the mind is free to make the connections which were there all the time. It’s a kind of think, make, think, make attitude.
13 What is art?
There is a Borges story called The Congress. The story starts with a man who conceives the idea of calling together a Congress of the World that could represent all men of all nations. Not only does he try to represent all mankind, which would mean representing all types of people down to the tiniest detail (men in hats, children with ginger hair), he tries to build a library that would be worthy of the Congress of the World. This means that he has to collect every type of book and every edition of that book, Ph.D. theses, old account books, bulletins, newspapers etc. After realising that the task that they had set for him self was so vast that it encompassed the whole world, he burns the collected books and goes his own way into the world.
Art for me is like this endeavour; a never ending process of collecting and representing. No absolute to be found only the world and its multiplicities.
14 How do you start the process of making work?
Research is a real starting point and having the right materials to hand. This doesn’t always happen and so you have to make do with what you have. Sometimes this can be the best way of working, but it is also important to keep a balance between what is needed and what is not. And a good strong coffee helps
15 Who prices your work? And how is the price decided upon?
(Material costs + £100 per day x commission) is my current equation, though recently it hasn’t been working so well. I spend a lot of time on my work, sometimes weeks and so the price can seem a little too much, but I guess its all about testing the water and seeing what you get back.
16 What is your next; move, project, show etc?
I have a couple of shows coming up and a few in the pipe line. I’ve got a solo show coming up in Chelm in Poland next July. It’s a really strange part of the country lots of open land and farms surrounding this small town. I spent two weeks there on a residency last June it was a really great experience, (loads of massive mosquitoes!) and so I’m looking forward to spending some more time there.
Also research plays a big role in my process so I’m back to the books and experimenting in the studio. My real aim is to work towards doing an MA. I find education really interesting. I left school after GCSE which has left me with a real thirst for knowledge.
17 What are the pros and cons of the art market?
The hardest thing to get used to is the uncertainty of the whole thing. There is no prescribed way to become successful and make money. It’s a hard thing to be able to manage money the way that an artist has to. A lot of the time you balance jobs and studio time which can be frustrating. A lot of artists make sellable work, pretty landscapes or portraits, but it really depends on what market you’re going for. I’ve always wanted to make interesting work and so this mostly equates to no money.
18 Which pieces would you like to be remembered for?
I saw the Turner Prize the other day and at the end of the show they had a video of Richard Wright talking about his practise. The site specificity of his work means that they are nearly all destroyed after the exhibition is over and he mentioned that he quite like the idea of not leaving anything to be remembered for. I thought about this for a while because I don’t think I’d ever realised what a strange thing it was to leave an art piece behind. (I had all these images of endless artists desperately making memento mori). I don’t really see the artist as responsible for the things they produce. For me an artists name is more of a classification tool then a means of glorification and so the idea of being remembered for something I leave behind doesn’t work for me.
19 Any routine in making your artwork? If so what?
A large part of my work at the moment is sourcing old books from second hand book shops and then tearing out the pages that I find interesting. I keep them all arranged into folders so that I can arrange them as I see fit. Even though there is a organisation process to my work I am very messy and so every other week or so I have a good tidy up.
20 Who has been the biggest influence on you?
I had a few artist obsessions though my life, they tend to come and go. I’ve just come out of a rather long obsession with Keith Tyson; I think he is a brilliant artist. His ideas on what it is to be an artist are very interesting and have helped form a lot of my ideas. It even got to the point where I would be producing work and my friends would say ‘Keith Tyson’s already done that’ and I’d Google it and think ‘f**k if only I’d been around a few years earlier’, but in the end it’s quite futile to try to be original when interested in KT’s practise.
21 How many artworks have you given away and to whom?
My sister is gathering quite a collection, she keeps asking for more. She has a piece in the toilet of her house, it looks quite good there.
