Bang Bang from
Katie Goodwin on Vimeo.
1.If you weren’t an artist, what else would you be?
I’d be a banker and have a big house in the country, a holiday house abroad
& 5 kids by now & a studio in the garden to paint landscapes at the weekend!
Actually though, if I had another life, I’d be a film director of films that needed to
be made.
2. Can you tell us more about your work and what are the main ideas you would like to express?
I make art out of detritus. I’m interested in finding value in the overlooked, giving it a new second life. Recently I’ve been using the language and tools of contemporary cinema to reimagine ‘cutting room floor’ footage. Chance, hidden labour and the cyclical nature of life are also themes I adhere to.
3. How do you start the process of making work?
I find something discarded that attracts or stops me in some way, however insignificant, and then reprocess it into something worthy of a second look. I mostly use animation as my medium as I find I can produce something more enigmatic, or perhaps seductive, with moving image. I consider my animations to be a form of painting. There is more of a challenge in creating 3000 images rather than 1 image. Also just by starting to animate it, something at the end
of its ‘life’ can be resuscitated and taken in an entirely different direction. It’s a kind of drawing and totally malleable. Each piece leads on from the next. One idea/mistake chases the next.
4. Do you consider the viewer, when making your work?
Yes. When I make a video piece I intentionally make my films quite short normally less than 3 minutes because not only do I have the attention span of a goldfish, why should I expect my viewer to give more than a few minutes of their time? I find 3 minutes is ample time to express a visual idea. I try to seduce the viewer with something enigmatic in the first few seconds – perhaps something familiar but a view they’ve never seen before. But then the viewer who persists is rewarded tenfold. A little gift for persevering!
5. Name 3 artists that have inspired your work?
Christian Marclay – the video artist who realised the utterly addictive and quite brilliant 24 hour film The Clock.
Cornelia Parker – she makes thoughtful poignant work without grandiose gestures. She also has a thing about exploding stuff and remnants and silent sound which is reminiscent in my own practice.
Anthony McCall – an artist who creates such graceful video/sculpture/ drawings that are spellbinding.
Also the writings of Italo Calvino have been a companion over the past year – I share his interest in lightness and dust and love the way he twists science into the fantastical.
6. Name 3 of your least favourite artists.
Sorry to be obvious but Damien Hirst. I liked his Vitrine and Pharmacy phases, but his more recent work hasn’t developed and seems to have lost touch with the audience. The diamond encrusted skull made me feel nauseous, especially when you compare it to someone like Orozco’s painstakingly pencilled skull which seeing in person I was quite awed by.
Also I’m a pretty harsh critic on video art generally mainly because it’s my medium. There are quite a lot of video artists who know nothing about making a film. I don’t think there’s much excuse for badly executed work. Craft is
important. I’m quite old fashioned like that. Deskilled work won’t hold my attention anymore and gives video art a bad name to a highly televisual audience. To name one, I was very disappointed by Klara Lidén’s show at the Serpentine a year or so ago. It is my favourite gallery and think they have had
shown some brilliant video artists.
Also the artist who said the comment in question 12) !
7. What defines something as a work of art?
Mmm that’s a question and a half. I suppose a creative or intellectual gesture that didn’t exist before and has some affect on the environment around however subtle.
But tomorrow I’d give a completely different answer.
A Space Odyssey Omit from Katie Goodwin on Vimeo.
8. In times of austerity, do you think art has a moral obligation to respond
topically?
Yes. With all the cuts, it makes it even harder for an artist to make a living wage. So I already create work with minimal material cost but also I very much consider my environmental impact on the planet. As an artist, I don’t want to produce an excess of stuff or in an excessive way. If art doesn’t reflect the current moment it isn’t contemporary. That’s perhaps why looking at Hirst’s more blingy work today is so distasteful as it just is so adverse to what’s going on.
9. Anytime, any place – which artist’s body would you most like to inhabit?
Gerhard Richter (but perhaps 20 odd years ago when he was a bit younger!) – I not only love his perfectly painted paintings but I’ve read a lot of what he has written and his ideas are very interesting and also shift as time passes. He
works from a vast collection of photographic imagery as source material and his subjects are always more than first meets the eye.
10. What is your favourite ‘ism’?
I have a little soft spot for Romanticism – especially Caspar David Friedrich and the literature of the time.
Silent Landscape from Katie Goodwin on Vimeo.
11. What was the most intelligent thing that someone said or wrote about your
work?
David Steans wrote a really thoughtful paragraph about the ‘understated bathos’ in my video piece ‘Silent Landscape’ 2010 (see above) In Sheffield New Contemporaries is spread across S1 Artspace and nearby Site Gallery. The work has been elegantly installed at both sites, the most pleasant surprise being the use of S1’s considerable ground floor space to project just three looped video works either side of a double-sided projection screen. The choice works to deflate the sometimes-daunting volume of New Contemporaries exhibitions. Of these three, and of the show in general, Katie Goodwin’s glacial Silent Landscape (2010) manages to transfix the average ‘New Contemporaries’ viewer’s attenuated attention-span with a work strange, dynamic and effectively durational in nature. A still HD shot of a mist-logged landscape, green but not wild, is held for a minute or two. The eye searches the painterly composition for movement. It remains inscrutable until an ultra slow-motion explosion of earth and smoke occurs in the near foreground, temporarily obscuring our vision. The smoke clears; the landscape remains. Silent Landscape has a certain understated bathos, with the detonation being both dramatic and somehow undermining of the video’s formal austerity. The blast itself could be from a home-made charge exploding in a golf course sand-pit. It nicely chimes – in counterpoint – with the theatrical apocalypse scenes of John Martin, a selection of which were shown at Sheffield’s Millennium Gallery earlier in the at Sheffield’s Millennium Gallery earlier in the year.
bloomberg-new-contemporaries-2011- review-by-david-steans
12. And the dumbest?
“Very naive isn’t it.” (A stupid artist talking very loudly about my work outside my studio door)
13. Which artists would you most like to rip off, sorry, I mean appropriate as a critique of originality and authorship?
Artists – George Shaw & Gerhard Richter & film directors – David Lynch & Jean-Pierre Jeunet.
14. Do you care what your art costs? State your reasons!
In a perfect world I’d get paid a living wage to make the animations but unfortunately in the real world, you have to sell something. So to sustain making my moving image work, I make a limited edition print for each new piece released. These are separate artworks in themselves and retain some of
the seductive qualities of my animations.
15. If the Tate and the Pompidou wanted to acquire one of your
works each, which would you want them to have?
A Space Odyssey Omit 1968/2011 ( http://vimeo.com/24539781 ) it’s an animation made from a rejected film frame from Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film A Space Odyssey. The slow moving animation seamlessly loops like a painting and is meant to be projected huge and would look epic in these museums. It also is screened with 1960s era slide projector screening the original frame.
16.
What’s next for you?
I’m off to Paris this week for the Couleur show and to discuss a potential solo exhibition. I’m also making a collaborative film with artist, Alex March. We’re looking for donors to give us their old Super 8 / cine footage – details are here super8filmfan.tumblr.com . I’m currently working on a new animation piece in collaboration with a film composer that is going to be in a group animation show called ‘971 Horses and 4 Zebras’ that’s going to tour in the UK and internationally. I’m constantly finding more bits & pieces of ‘waste’ to make some new work which is starting to take my work in a slightly new direction. And I’ve just moved to a new studio with Ian Maslen so hoping new connections and conversations will be made.
I Also have a show opening on the 31st May at Grey Area in Paris showing one of my newest animations ‘Dawn of the Rainbow’ made from the leader from the 1939 film Wizard of Oz (whilst on the Pixel Palace residency in Newcastle) and some related 2D works.
www.katiegoodwin.com
www.vimeo.com/katiegoodwin
The Other Art Fair + FAD pre fair party Thursday May 3rd 2012 from 6pm at Boxpark Join The Facebook Event for more info and a free drink: www.facebook.com>
2 – Silent Landscape 2010 (Installation shot at BNC2011, S1 Artspace, Sheffield.
Dustbust 2011 (Installation shot)
