What has been your favorite collaboration so far? I can’t pick just one. They’ve all been great in their own way. You started the New Year with a post on your blog dedicated to memories and nostalgia. The old surfaces seem to ignite your style; your modern aesthetic is intensified by a melancholy, antique surface. When creating, does the narrative transform as organically as the art does? Narrative is always something that tends to develop along the way, without too much premeditation. More often than not I tend to go with what feels right at any given time, for a piece or a body of work, and leave meaning and narrative as open-ended as possible – for myself and for the viewer. Do you have advice for artists starting out on their own? Everyone has to find their own path, there’s no right way to do this. It’s a combination of taking the advice of others, and discovering your own way. Working as hard as you possibly can, all the time. As you begin to meld your artistic talents in dance, the visual arts, and so forth—where have you found new areas of intrigue? Well, my main interests right now are in painting, writing, dance and photography, but am getting really interested in moving pictures too –video and film. I am most interested in the places where these disparate interests overlap, the moments where I can find room for dialogue, interaction and new ways of approaching each discipline. I think what’s been most exciting for me as a creative being is the realization that there is no need to limit myself; that every mode of creation is a relevant path of inquiry, and that it all comes from and feeds back to the same source. It just opens up a whole new realm of possibility, for my solo work and in collaboration with other artists of all genres. How do you see this developing? Life is long, and I plan on being a maker of things– all kinds of things–until the very end (and hopefully afterwards). Right now I have a lot of ideas for different things that will exist as separate entities from each other–I’m working on a short dance film, and a manuscript for a book of poetry. I have a million and one
ideas for different art projects bouncing around in my skull and am never without my camera. But I think that eventually I will find more ways of combining all of these interests into a more cohesive practice, spending bigger chunks of time working on larger projects that encompass multiple disciplines. I think collaboration will always be a big part of my existence–bringing people together to create something out of shared interests, something greater than any one of us could have done on our own. What’s next? I’m going to be in Cape Town, South Africa for all of April, doing a residency with A Word of Art. While I am there I will be creating work for an exhibition and painting a bunch of walls with my friend David Shillinglaw, an artist from London who will be in residence at the same time. At the end of the month, we’re all going to Afrikaburn to set up a big art installation and spend a week painting out in the middle of the Karoo desert. After that, I’m spending a couple weeks traveling around a bit in South Africa and Mozambique, shooting part of a documentary with Six Oranges, a film company from London. Then I have a week in the UK – going to a paint jam up in Blackpool–before I come back home and get started on prep work for projects here over the summer. END
PHOTO BY Kris Krug
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