Jon Kipps
"My idea of making sculpture is that it’s possible to charge materials with a sort of low-fi power. When you invest enough energy into making an object it can acquire a special sort of resonance. "
Could you tell us a bit about yourself and your background? Where did you study?
I grew up in a suburb of Southend-on-Sea, Essex. In my teenage years I played guitar in a punk band with some other friends from school and this is really what ignited my thirst for making things creatively. I found the composing side of it extremely satisfying, working together to make something that felt much bigger than the sum of its parts. The scene we became a part of also instilled in me a DIY approach from very early on.
I was studying Art Foundation in Thurrock when the band split up and I shifted into making sculpture, but the creative approach I learnt from music was key to how I approached making artwork. After Art Foundation I studied at Nottingham Trent University and then MFA Sculpture at Slade which was when I moved to London. Between BA and MFA though I spent a few years back in Southend helping set up and run Southend’s first artist-led project space in a derelict waterworks. We had studio spaces, a gallery and a small cinema. This was my introduction into all the work that goes into organising and creating exhibitions. We exhibited local artists as well as more established names from out of town.
Your sculptures seem to explore the idea of power and social hierarchies through design. Can you talk more about how you approach this subject matter and how it influences the materiality of your work?
My approach really came through a curiosity about the built environment and the decisions of how and why things are made and how the affect people. When you dig deep enough there are often very interesting stories to be found, especially when you realise how much of the way the world is designed revolves around authority, control or attempting to manipulate peoples’ behaviour and ideas.
Sculpture belongs to the ‘stuff’ of the world and for me it’s a really interesting way to unpick some of the visual cues around us because you can bring things together from different sources and create an object without a linear agenda, one that we can find engaging on a level that is very difficult to explain with words.
My idea of making sculpture is that it’s possible to charge materials with a sort of low-fi power. When you invest enough energy into making an object it can acquire a special sort of resonance. With this in mind I often use discarded materials such wood offcuts or bits of packaging, but I manipulate the shapes and surfaces in order to shift the way they are perceived and hopefully give them the gravitas of something more substantial such as bronze or steel.
Wish, 2022
Pharaoh Overlord, 2020
Never Ending Game, 2023
Thirsk Hall, photo: Joe Lang
When creating your wall-based sculptures, how do you select and combine various design and symbolic elements to achieve their unique appearance?
I have a huge bank of source images - quick pictures that I take all the time of things I encounter when I’m out and about or research ideas. I don’t over think subject matter, I just try to keep open to noticing what is around me. By collating such an array of disparate images all in one place I find I can quickly and easily pull different un-related elements together into a work. Then I keep trying different things out with the physical materials in my studio until I find a combination that feels exciting. For example in Yourcodenameis:milo I stacked red dots that mimic an AI facial recognition pattern on top of an adaptation of quatrefoil (a very common shape in Gothic architecture), a cross and a pentagon.
A few years ago I listened to a podcast discussing attempts to design warning markers intended to last tens of thousands of years to protect future civilisations from the dangers of radioactive waste. The thought of such an impossible task became a key impetus for the small works and something I have been riffing on ever since, thinking about how humans could relate to symbols and images when our current language and cultural registers are long obsolete.
In what ways does music and subculture impact your creative process and the development of your sculptures, particularly with regards to your latest series named after metal bands?
As I mentioned, making music was really the first form of creativity I properly connected with and in many ways it became my road map to not only creating artwork, but also navigating ideas and trying to understand an industry (the art world) that I knew nothing about - there are so many parallels.
The idea of using band names to title sculptures was partially a nod to all of that, but also there is a lot of atmosphere instilled in band names which tell us a little bit about their standpoints, influences and what sort of genre niche they might slot into. When you bring words from one context like that into another the meanings shift. The words take on a different significance when paired with an object and the social/political themes of the current day. One example of this is a work I made a couple of years ago titled Power Trip (named after an American thrash band). The outline of the work was designed to fit around the boot of my friend Dan’s car which he drove over 1000 miles to Belgrade, Serbia (for an exhibition we did together) while the UK was in Covid lockdown.
The Stone, 2020
Lightning Bolt, 2019, photo: Nick Singleton
Tell us a bit about how you spend your day / studio routine? What is your studio like?
My studio is in a great complex called Black Tower in Sydenham S.E London.
I have an ‘art’ side and a ‘tool’ side, with the middle area for freestanding objects and space for making everything. The ‘art’ side has a clean white wall, for seeing and thinking about things clearly, then all my tools are organised into drawers and there’s a wood rack and some shelves for small finished things that I can easily show to visitors. There is also lots of natural daylight coming in from a long row of windows at the front.
When I walk in the door I immediately switch into a full mucky clothes outfit and make a coffee. Normally, from the end of the previous day, I will have left a few ‘in progress’ things and tools around as reminders or cues to help me get back into it quickly - so while I drink the coffee I might remove clamps from a glue up or use the scissors start cutting bits of paper. I’m usually working on 5 or 6 things at any one time and I tend to jump around between each work rather than getting too rigidly into one thing.
What artwork have you seen recently that has resonated with you?
Frank Kent recently had an exhibition at Karsten Schubert which I thought was mind blowingly good! Disclaimer - he is a good friend of mine, but I genuinely think these new works of his are incredible. They are tender and fragile with beautiful colours and they suited the historic room they were shown in perfectly. A couple of works had really amazing wobble that activated them as people walked on the surrounding floorboards. I’m sure if you look up pictures you’ll be able to imagine what I mean.
Another one that jumps to mind is Felicity Hammond recently made a big public commission outside Christchurch Mansion in Ipswich. I love the interplay she created between photographic collage and large scale installation and I think we probably have some similar interests in terms of themes.
Oh, also Daniel Pasteiner made a brilliant exhibition at Studio 1.1 called Daemon Waves with lots of dream like compositions painted on top of sandblasted solar panels. I thought that pairing of repurposed technology with watercolour and acrylic was super interesting.
Is there anything new and exciting in the pipeline you would like to tell us about?
Yes! I’m just about to start installing a new exhibition at Standpoint gallery in London. It will be my first London solo presentation so I’m pretty excited to share what I’ve been working in with people in my home city.
For this show I’ve been revisiting some slightly older ‘obstacle’ sculptures and reimagining them as flat pack kits. I’ve been using chameleon paint for the first time to make bespoke shelves for each piece in the kit, which is a little nod to my Essex routes and the customised car gatherings along Southend sea front that I used to observe as a teenager. Some of the new smaller works will be sunk into the paster of the space revealing hidden layers of the building and there will also be new objects made from mycelium that I have been growing in my boiler cupboard at home using moulds made from packaging materials such as plastic soup pots and Fererro Rocher boxes.
The exhibition is called Deep Adaptation (named after a climate change paper by Jem Bendell) and will be run 7-29 April at Standpoint on Coronet Street.
All images are courtesy of the artist
Date of publication: 20/04/23
