KNEON vilified poster girl for the self-indulgence of contemporary art. I think it’s sad that she’s not taken seriously as an artist by a lot of people because her early work was truly groundbreaking and she was a genuine maverick. She also has this beautifully perceptive technical skill that people often overlook, and personally I think it’s exciting to return to craft processes as we’re in this precarious position today where art might loose all sense of technical skill. If you were to ask me who my favourite artist was, I would have to say Phyllida Barlow as I think visually her installations are stunning, but also her approach to creating art is similar to mine in that we both create objects of physicality that simply exist in a space and don’t rely on concepts to legitimise them.
What are you trying to communicate through your work? To be honest, and this is going to sound very inartistic of me, I’m not really trying to convey anything particularly profound or deep with my work as that’s not why I make art. Creating work about my own experiences and emotions is a cathartic way for me to invest in or expunge things I want to elevate or deal with. The durational aspects of my performances for example are merely a way for me to test my artistic integrity and explore my own role within my work. There was one piece where I made a cake, a Raspberry Victoria Sponge, and I basically set myself the challenge to eat the whole thing. About three quarters of the way in I was sick but in order to complete my artistic pursuit I had to keep eating. It was a pretty grim experience but to me it was encouraging to see that I can actually push my own boundaries for my art. I could bullshit to you and pretend it was about society’s relentless obsession with consumption or how the individual has been damaged by the dismal economic times or something, but truthfully, it was really just about me, me, me. Oh God I must sound so self-obsessed.
Can you tell us a bit about your piece ‘Fucking Sinister Obsessive Weirdo’? It’s a quote someone I was vaguely involved with said to me during quite a toxic conversation, and I was a bit like, “oh fuck, is he right…?” and the words stayed with me for quite a while. So the idea behind this piece was to reproduce the quote in something aggressively cheerful that worked against the malicious context of the words to reflect my unhealthy obsession with repressing my emotions and pretending that “EVERYTHING IS FINE…” which is something I think we all do on some level. Also, I feel like the offering of flowers has become such an empty gesture now as they apply to every and any kind of occasion – weddings, funerals, that kind of thing, and don’t really say anything in themselves, so I guess I thought that using flowers was a way to disassociate myself from the words.
What can’t you live without? Knitting needles and Nando’s.
What do you plan on doing after the foundation course? Me and a friend set up this organisation called RAW last year that’s designed to give young artists still in arts education a platform to showcase their work, and we curated a show in Peckham just before Christmas which was an amazing experience, so we want to put together another exhibition as soon as we’ve finished. In summer I’m interrailing across Eastern Europe and hopefully finishing at the Venice Biennale. But then after that I want to get on with my education and do my fine art BA.
The theme of this issue is ‘dreamer’, do you consider yourself to be one? I’m definitely not a doer so I guess yeah, I am. But then who doesn’t like to dream big?