Your response to the grounds is collectively titled “Dazzle Site”, and you consistently pair and interlace two motifs: rippling water and the repetitive steel diamond plate patterns familiar from staircases and metal platforms and surfaces. What did you discover at the site that connected to or evoked the naval “dazzle” device? On day one of the residency I found myself at the edge of the two lakes which lie at the centre of the park. This water was the first place I walked to, the first surface and material I explored. The lakes transformed the surrounding landscape in a peculiar way. I became immersed and at the same time there was something that didn’t seem right. I later unearthed that the lakes were in fact manmade constructions. Large fake holes commissioned by successive generations of the previous owners of the estate. This was the trigger for me and I set about exploring the landscape as a product; a concealed construction site where nature and industry converged. Assemblages began to take form which explored the relationship between the architecture of the water with the materials of industry that I had encountered during the residency. These encounters happened in the park, in local DIY stores, and I found myself walking upon the steel diamond plate that you refer to at the National Coal Mining Museum for England which is a few miles away from YSP. It’s interesting to think that the histories of sculpture and mining are situated in close proximity to each other. It seems important that you perform an archaeology in this work, to reveal the manmade nature of the lake and the crossover between industry and culture. Your work has often drawn upon labour. What interests you in this subject? Labour and industry have been a constant in my life. My relationship with labour, materials and the land has been shaped in two significant ways. East Anglia, where I grew up, is in part defined by agriculture, cultivating the landscape and industry. Also, my father—who I now recognize as having a huge influence on my practice—worked with timber all of his life. He was a boat builder in the 1960s and then a furniture maker for thirty years. I spent a lot of my childhood watching him and helping him. I suppose something changed, in an exciting way, when fine art was introduced into my life in my early teens.
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New Establishment
Does the dissemination of photographs have an effect on how you conceive of the art object? I think I probably have an obsession with the image and its effect in the world. How can photography be used in an influential way to create access points and moments of compelling encounter? I am constantly posing this question to myself. But also I must say that an encounter with a site-specific artwork cannot be underestimated. If one has ever sat in a womb-like sculpture by James Turrell for example and looked upwards, or bumped into a wandering animal in a Pierre Huyghe exhibition, then a strong argument can be formed against the image as an effective document and representation. There does seem to be, however much you use the photograph, a concern to find its weaknesses or limits. Does this come from an interest you had in early photo-conceptualism, and how artists worked with a variety of mediums, not just photography? The limits of the photograph are definitely a concern. Equally this is paired with a faith in the photographic image. It sings for itself, but it is also a messenger for and collaborator with many other mediums. Also, my encounter with the history of sculpture and performance, significantly via the photograph, greatly shaped my interest in pursuing a convergence between these mediums. Two encounters opened or swayed my mind. The first was the work of Robert Mapplethorpe. Secondly, I can recall travelling to London in 2002 to see an Ansel Adams exhibition at the Hayward Gallery. Later that day I stumbled across a Dan Flavin work. I remember being knocked sideways by Flavin’s conceptual approach to the ordinary and the everyday, and I started to consider how my photography could operate with other media. It sounds like this is a moment where you realized that what Adams was capturing with the camera was also available in even the most humble fluorescent tube. Did this feel closer to your own lived experience somehow? Definitely. Completely. I also recall being a little uncomfortable at the time. Uncomfortable about a feeling of awe and connection that I felt to what in essence was the transformation of the workaday. The preceding ten years were spent with my head in Magnum books. I think as a young, graduating artist, at least in my case, one resists particular influences and histories. One of the challenges is to find and then to accept certain influences and interests and allow these to shape one’s practice, regardless of the perceived significance or insignificance.