“Consumerism Is another strand of our larger material culture that influences the circulation and binning of stuff, shaped by some idea of desire and need.”

Interview by Rochelle Roberts

Could you tell us a bit about yourselves and your background? Where did you study?

I’m from the North-East of England, Teesside to be more exact. It’s a typical post-industrial era waiting for a new deal that’s never quite emerged. 

I moved to London in 2010 to study painting at Camberwell. It was a hive of experimentation and oddity, its reputation as the lo-fi misfit of UAL was rather well deserved. In retrospect, I’d say I had quite the culture shock as I had to actually interact with contemporary art for the first time whilst everyone else seemed to have read Baudrillard at age 12. (I eventually got around to it) After many a bad painting I graduated in 2013 and have clung onto London ever since.

I worked in theatre by night for a number of years after school ended, moving the set and by day lived in warehouses and shit flats trying to keep going and eventually curated a few shows.  I now work as a Scenic Carpenter for museums, theatre and the like, building sets to tell stories that get burnt immediately after use. I’ve also started the MFA program at Goldsmiths.

Can you speak a bit about what roles popular and consumer culture play in the type of work you make and how platforms such as Instagram and Facebook feed into this?

Well, I’m as plugged into the internet as everyone else is. Trawling through online content is mostly how I see shows, particularly at the moment. Naturally, I become another node in the network redistributing content. I’m interested in the circulation and reuse of things, so Instagram is something I pay attention to because that’s what it’s all about.

I’ve used both dogs and The Simpsons in the work because they’re so exploitable. The ubiquitous emotional familiarity people have with them forms a kind of shorthand you can work from to build to other things, and I’m on the look-out for what else works in the same way.

Consumerism Is another strand of our larger material culture that influences the circulation and binning of stuff, shaped by some idea of desire and need. I’m quite interested in Home Sense (the store) because it is packed with absolute crap, and gaudy cheap recreations of stuff straight up appropriated from other cultures, which I think is attached to some idea of buying-in authenticity. I decided to open a garden centre in my studio one summer, selling fake ruins as a sort of parody of this. You can still buy them for twenty quid a pop.

I am interested in your use of found objects within your practice and wonder whether you could tell us about your process in finding and collecting them. For instance, do you know beforehand that you want to use tyres in a particular work and go out to find some, or is the process more organic?

It’s Interesting that you ask this because I’ve often seen a sort of contradiction within the fact that I’m both interested in objects yet have never really collected or used ‘ready-mades’ in the work. Only as recently as my last exhibition at Thames-Side Studios did I start to make use of actual ready-made things, though the tyre bales I had never seen in the flesh before they turned up on the truck.

It’s a very organic process. I’m a grazer and observer. I screenshot things that grab my attention or force a second glance, I photograph or make a note of something I saw out in the world (when that was a thing we could do!). I find myself attracted to things because of the contradictions they seem to infer or embody, like the ‘eco-friendly’ nature of a violently produced (to exacting standards) cube of rubber tyres at the end of their life ready to be buried, having kept the global supply chain and human capital on the move. Interrogating these things becomes a source of work, trying to articulate connections between things, teasing out semi-conspiratorial relationships, etc.

A problem has been this need for things to be ‘made’ as opposed to just ‘used’ and that has gotten in the way in the past and led to this situation where work has become very detached from where it came from, and I’ve ended up ‘hanging’ subject matter on it like it was a scarecrow. Realising I could just use a direct reference was somewhat of a banal eureka moment for me, and working through the actual qualities of a thing, for instance building an entire show around a fridge magnet and reaching to The Simpsons to do it, was a lot more satisfying a result, and I’ll be doing that way more in future.

I would love to know more about the relationship between dogs and people in your work. I am thinking specifically of the Sitcom Expressions and Seinfeld pieces where you've used dogs instead of people.

I guess I see the dog as the ultimate consumed object, either through historical selective breeding or contemporaneously through how its cuteness gets traded online. Consumption also brings up the question of agency, of which I suppose I considered the dog to have little.

I was interested in how a thing can actually gain agency through constant use and reuse. I was looking at sitcom advertising at the time and made a collection of various ones dating back to the days of black and white. What’s interesting is how a very specific visual language, the buddying up, the jostling, arms touching, tilted heads, etc became a fairly loaded signifier of the set number of plots likely on offer, that most sitcoms trade in which is independent of the specifics of the characters or context.

I was curious as to what would happen if you took this weird evolved trope and found a way to enmesh it with dogs, maybe to give one what the other had gained. The most logical way to approach this to me seemed to be through a faux ancient artefact, of the sort you might find in a museum. In fact, they were loosely based on The Yaxchilan Lintels in the British Museum. In this sense, this historical context is emphasised, but also brings up the ethical dimension of consumption, ownership, and agency.

The work ultimately is complicit within whatever it might be said to critique or reflect on.  

What artwork have you seen recently that has resonated with you?

Great question.

It might be worth mentioning that my access to physical art has been pretty limited the last 6 months or so. I work in museums a lot.  I’ve had a daily relationship with the limewood carvings at the V&A this winter. There’s one particular carving that has me impressed, its rather like the figure wrapped in beautifully furrowed gold fabric has been squashed by a truck. 

How do you go about naming your work?

Works are very rarely thought up in isolation from other works and in that sense, I’m usually making things for shows. In other words, I don’t name anything in advance and I apply names on the spot that seem to fit with the work in that context, along-side everything else, and maybe they stick or mutate a little over time.

Is there anything new and exciting in the pipeline you would like to tell us about?

I’m interested in curating a series of shows made up of projects ruined by COVID. I think the creative ecosystem that we’re working in has been bleached and we’re all still getting to grips with it. I think sharing spaces with one another, and artist let enclaves, in general, will become even more of a necessity. I’m set to design the set for a short play fantastically written by a friend, I’m also returning to my plasticine rhino carvings. (clawing empathy is a recurring interest)

Artist’s website
Instagram
thames-sidestudios.co.uk

All images are courtesy of the artist, photography by Reinis Lismanis.
Date of publication: 21/01/21