1 Can you tell us about your art practice and the themes you try to explore.
I am interested in that question because I don’t see my work as having themes and it never really feels like an exploration. The bit of making that I am most interested in is the transient quality of everything that surrounds an artwork or an object in general. It fascinates me that there can be a certain solidity to an object or artwork which can never be truly reflected in the way that we view it. We constantly translate and project onto, the things we make and this can be an extremely generative process but it can also leave the object or artwork behind, almost dragged into performing like a chained bear. I want my work to toil with the problems of interpretation, to shape shift and pose, but to always approach important things about being human and the non-verbal experiences which we all have. If I could explain fully what I do, then I would almost instantly fail in my desire for the work to test the limits of my ability to explain myself using words. So in this way my practice often feels unsteady and delicate in its refusal of linearity, but I like this. Working with language but not really with the intention of it being read directly, allows me to talk about something like sculpture but without demoting it to the status of bullet point in the margin.
2 Can you tell us about Time Team
Time Team brings together a series of older videos made previously and uses them to generate a new sculpture and video installation. Over the past year or so I have been writing fake lectures, on topics which don’t really go anywhere but use metaphor rather than fact to talk loosely about a feeling or something which is not easy to speak verbally about. I wrote these believing that I could use a very serious and dogmatic format for the transferral of information such as the lecture or just verbal language, to deliver slightly more fluffy or nondescript ideas, almost like squeezing a sculpture and all its ideas and decisions into words and back again. This way the sculptures and to some extent the videos I make become like glyphs which tempt meaning, like seeing a landscape in a pebble. The new video made for the show seeks to disrupt the previous work by going further to convey a sense of desperation to communicate but all the while hindered by the object. The new video is called Can these words reach into that darkness? And involves collected and self produced footage which would otherwise be disparate but is brought together by the narrative of text and song. There is a large sculpture which accompanies the video and there is a confusion as to whether the sculpture or the video came first. I am interested in the idea that through layering many different forms of visual and verbal information, I might be able to make something which feels whole.
3 What’s happening on November 6th?
There will be a performance involving three performers who will act out a sort of play based on the letter U, they will firstly make a large letter U out of clay, they will be singing and one will play a drum. Functioning as a counterpoint to the large metal sculpture found in the show. The sculpture is based on a 10 metre tall letter I but only includes the bottom quarter as though it has been snapped off. The performance and the sculpture will form U and I respectively. I am interested in letters becoming physical and inhabiting our built environment as objects, meaning something very fixed as a letter, but something open and fluid as an object. It is important for me that I approach making performances in the same way I might a sculpture or a film, even though performance involves a very different process of negotiation through collaboration. I aim for the performances I make to inhabit an existence which floats somewhere between a hazy inclination and a thing too clearly defined. I think verbal language can often bring things too clearly into focus and this is why I try not to think too verbally about what I am making. I have found over the last year or so that by working with close friends as performers, I can avoid having to over explain and rely on something more like intuition as a making process. This performance acts like a celebration of interaction, but treats the tools by which we often do so (language and letters) as objects to be made and negotiated physically.
Zabludowicz Collection Invites: Luke McCreadie until –6th November
Sunday performance 3-5pm
