Candida Powell-Williams
“I think of my works as caricatures - a reduced form of an idea or representation which in it’s reduction gets closer to a true depiction.”
Interview by Sonja Teszler
Could you tell us a bit about yourself and your background? Where did you study?
I did a BA in Fine Art at the Slade followed by an MA in Sculpture at the Royal College. Except for a year in Rome and a few months in Paris I’ve always lived in London but I’m always talking about leaving.
Your stage-like installations and works are inherently performative and mix a variety of rich spiritual references in a way that is still playful and non-didactic. Could you talk a bit about these references and what drew you to your subject matter?
Like most children I loved fairytales and myths and lucky charms. I grew up in the late 80s and 90s, well after the New Age heyday but a lot of the paraphernalia surrounding it was circulating in pop culture. There was a shop by my school where we would buy mood rings and crystals and Mystic Meg was on the National Lottery programme! So I was surrounded by quite a broad notion of spirituality and maybe as a result I’ve always been really fascinated by how esoteric objects are animated by us physically and in the mind how we perceive meaning in them. My sculptural works are representations of the process of interpreting the material world particularly artefacts and how they might symbolises and promise something like luck but don’t provide any clue as to how it might do this thing. For example in Vernacular History of the Golden Rhubarb (2017) all the sculptures were made to describe the way the artefacts in Rome are used by a tourists for wishes and lucky charms or to reveal their true selves. I think of what I’m doing as mapping a philosophical journey through the world of stuff. I suppose my work is playful perhaps because what it is dealing with is absurdity. The candy colours also make it playful and animate the stationary works. I think of my works as caricatures - a reduced form of an idea or representation which in it’s reduction gets closer to a true depiction. By using a language of approximations my sculptures often become emblematic. In general I think emblems can seem esoteric and have a kind of pseudo spirituality imbued into them because they are so confusing and self-assured.
Performance is a key element to your practice- are you interested in both the autonomous architecture of the installations as well as the narrative added to them by the performers and the audience?
Certainly. I am very interested in formal sculptural qualities but I always return to this idea of objects as a live event even when they aren’t animated. When I’m making a show I think about how to ‘stage’ the sculptures in space so that they are always dynamic because the majority of the time the installation is inert. I want take the viewer somewhere else the moment they walk into it- whether that be to a known place like a Roman courtyard or some kind of alternative reality. I worked in theatre for over 10 years; throughout A levels, further and higher education so it played a consistent influence during formative years. I’ve always been interested in the suspension of disbelief (which is basically the opposite of how viewers approach art in a gallery), and theatrical simulacra- by which I mean representation of something that is constrained by the limits of the stage or the required theatrical function and the illusion and trickery of it all. One of the things I always loved was seeing the empty sets and all the mechanics behind the artifice.
What artwork have you seen recently that has resonated with you?
It was incredible to see the William Blake works in the flesh. These tiny powerful, imaginative works felt so relevant today. Shana Moulton has a big installation at Zabludowicz Collection in London which is spectacular. The works are dealing with contemporary anxiety and the wellness industry- yoga, crystal healing, saunas etc. Her avatar Cynthia is constantly trapped; trapped inside a weird bedroom, then inside a screen, which is then inside an object, all of which is terrifying. I’ve also just come back from Venice and Laure Provost’s work for the French pavilion will stay with me for a long time.
Boredom & it's Acid Touch. 2017. Frieze Live. (photo Damian Griffiths)
Boredom & it's Acid Touch 2017. Frieze Live
Command Lines, Void Gallery, 2019. Installation view. Photo courtesy of Tansy Cowley and Void Gallery
Command Lines, Void Gallery, 2019. Installation view. Photo courtesy of Tansy Cowley and Void Gallery
Command Lines, Void Gallery, 2019. Installation view. Photo courtesy of Tansy Cowley and Void Gallery
Can you elaborate on what themes within digital culture your work is interested in and any overlaps between the digital and the magical?
I’m interested in the way my work interacts with the digital. The internet supports my research process in terms of patterns of information and chains of associations. Magic and digital culture is a big topic but my interest is in the way this medium can support magical thinking and escapism. I’m also trying different ways of putting my sculptural work into the digital so that it can harness the conflation of time, space and place despite being originally rooted in those ideas.
Touch is central to my thinking firstly in terms of the rituals and artefacts that I reference (like the statue rubbing), secondly in the way I make sculptures (I don’t really use processes that don’t involve directly touching the materials) and thirdly by working with performers interacting with objects. The digital world is also all about touch but what it feels like is different –by touching it you can conjure into an infinite space with no limitations. The word digital derives from the Latin word digitus which means finger(as well as numbers which obviously is the basis of coding). Even though touch is mediated by a screen it can still create a bodily experience. Exploring the internet is a kind of magical journey in limitless space. Big tech companies predict our future by controlling what we see which has the illusion of being oracular. There is an anxiety about that and nostalgia for the industrious craft industries being replaced with digital processes like 4D printing. To make physical sculptural works is expensive and an ecological not great plus the objects end up being seen more on a screen than in the flesh which makes the pursuit seem absurd! A massive problem for me is that sculpture in the digital age could appear to be about the anxiety surrounding what it means to touch and conjure up something.
Can you talk about the connection of site-specificity to your practice and methodology - would you say the symbolism and narratives explored in respective exhibitions are informed by a specific location and audience?
More often than not my works have been site specific even if the location of their presentation has been different from the location they were informed by- as was the case of with Vernacular History of the Golden Rhubarb (2017) which was about experiencing artefacts in Rome but was shown at Bosse&Baum in London. Works like Coade’s Elixir (2014) were entirely about history of the site of the Southbank Centre where it was shown and more recently Sonic Arrangements in the Infinite Fill (2019) was a response to the site it was made for- the Derry city walls. Each one took the symbolic value of place as the subject matter. I mentioned already that I bring my audience’s memory into the work by making gifs with their digital footprint which was most overt in Boredom and it’s acid touch (2017) at Frieze London so really making the work about a specific site and moment. Even in the tarot project which has taken place in a number of different locations, site has played into the meaning of the work. At it’s very core Tarot cards are derived from Italian playing cards, so I have used caricatures of Classical architecture which has consequently rooted the work in a Western vision of a philosophical journey. Dr Edwin Coomasuru has been researching the rhetoric of magical thinking in relation to Brexit and Northern Ireland and has been thinking through this in relation to my tarot work. So in this case site has given the work a meaning I hadn’t originally intended. That is really great because at the very heart of my practice is the mutability of meaning in symbols and the effect that time and place can have on stuff.
(Judgement) Lessness, Still Quorum, The Serpentine Galleries 2018 (photo Rob Harris)
Vernacular Histroy of the Golden Rhubarb. 2017. Bosse&Baum
Cache, 2017, Art Night Associate Programme (photo Damian Griffiths)
Sonic Arrangements in the Infinite Fill, Derry Walls, Walker Plinth, 2019. Photo courtesy of Tansy Cowley and Void Gallery
You use a variety of materials and textures to make the objects themselves - would you talk about how the range and fluidity of all these mediums, including performance, and their relationship to each other and the audience informs your work?
The relationship between the different mediums I use is as important as the subject that informs the work. Generally there is a sequence of making and experimenting that goes drawing- sculpture- performance- digital work, each stage informing the next. I like the way we remember our experience of an object in time and space in our imagination as a series of poignant moments so I have sometimes used the audience’s social media photos to create the documentation of a performance and complied them into gifs to bring memory directly into the work.
In terms of materiality, I tend to bring a chorus of sculptures together so I think about what they have in common or how I want them to differ. I want to create a range of impacts that carries the viewer across and through the space just like the variety of brushstrokes across a canvas. I‘m mostly bothered about the surface and whether or not it is soft, shiny, sharp, roughly shaped, or like a pebble worn away by the sea. I have a set of rules which define what material or surface a sculpture should be. The rules are based on the status the object has within the scene for example if it was an animal I make it from a certain material depending on whether or not what is depicted is alive or dead or mimicking a sculpture of an animal.
How do you go about naming your work?
As soon as I start making a work I start thinking about what to call it and it often changes if the works context changes. I keep lists of words or phrases on my phone and on the wall of my studio. I read a lot of poetry and Absurdist literature so that’s been very influential and I frequently lift phrases from these authors that resonate with what I’m thinking about.
Is there anything new and exciting in the pipeline you would like to tell us about?
In a few weeks I have a show opening at Bosse&Baum Gallery London called The Gates of Apophenia. Apophenia is seeing connections between things that aren’t really there- so for example seeing a face in the moon. The show is all about how we perceive meaning and attempt to find reason in something random or inaccessible. It will be an installation of 22 box frames containing miniature sculptural scenes derived from tarot cards (playing cards used for divination). The work stems from a research residency at the Warburg Institute London exploring the cultural heritage of tarot, the mutation of symbols and the art historian Aby Warburg’s legacy. The project has developed through performance, a published card deck and a solo exhibition at Void Gallery, Derry Northern Ireland earlier this year. At Bosse&Baum I will present a journey through my small-scale sculptural deck, mapping the reoccurring symbols and exploring the psychology of the architecture and how humans have given form and shape to enigmatic concepts and abstract qualities like fate, justice or fortitude.
All images are courtesy of the artist and Bosse&Baum Gallery
Publish date: 24/10/19
