What was it about the club project that interested you? Is this a change of scale/pace/type of commission?

You’re right that to work on a small series does involve quite a different approach and that shift can act as a healthy catalyst. In this case, an opportunity to work in and on my environment with cast materials – and in so doing to commit to a form and undergo a process of hand-building and then the translation from the part made and part readymade thing to somewhere new.

The proposal of a pocket of activity and a chance to speak with a different voice is always exciting. At this particular moment, when shifting between working spaces in various states of finish or undress or reveal, and after the closing in of walls post-pandemic (& still reeling) I wanted to deal with the materials of my own walls, that I suppose are a metaphor for various separations of self, while remaining animate themselves.

Taking them and housing them in small shadow boxes, and then casting them to invoke the remnant, its’ construction, and the layers of natural decomposition held in stasis only partially – because the cast form is acted upon afterwards (with paint and other materials), and continues to relate to other objects vitally, physically, sensually. 

Your work often shifts perception of dimension, working on a smaller scale like this – does that become more challenging?

That’s an interesting question. I think of scale/dimension not only in real terms. What can a work offer up when it is a viewfinder or a portal to a world/worlds around itself, via real and imaginative means?

I’m also thinking about the miniature and macro – the shift between something real – the scale of material stuff – a brick, a book, a box, a slate etc, also being able to act as a theatre, and to play with the potentials of existing in that state of ‘prelude’ which is very live – it’s a testing ground. I think the challenge is how to keep this sense of live potential in a series like this…

This relationship between painting and sculpture is often foregrounded in your work? How does this relationship sit with you now, or in what ways has it developed over the past decade? Will it become closer in this project for SPG?

In relation to sculptural precedents there is always an apprehension toward painting, colour and light, ideas I have explored in different landscapes. My recent work for the University of Leeds, The worlds of If, made for the new ICEPS building, used iridescent paint on its surfaces so hiding and revealing itself from different angles. 

Beams of light bounce from upper and lower surfaces of the film, changing in relation to the angle you view it, just as in nature it is seen in the wings of beetles, the feathers of starlings and the inside of a shell. So that from different views the work appears to adapt its colour palette, optically to play with space.

For SPG, the work is cast and its nature as an object feels primary. Hung on the wall as a relief, the piece evokes painting and paint is used as matter to alter each cast, to activate its materiality and clash with it too, in a kind of negotiation.

Painting has us suspended in between fact and fiction. It feels natural to evade the specification – perhaps I’m chasing what the work is not.

I wondered if Maquette making is a process that you use in creating all your artworks? 

That interaction between the scale & play of model (an approximation ) and the idea of exactness, endurance or immensity (in public sculpture or architecture) has been a long-standing interest. This in relation to ideas of temporality or permanence, and a need for me to hold onto provisionality on a scale outdoors.

I think what I could say with certainty is – that I always make a work as if it were a maquette. It might come to be the work itself, or it may need to be made again in more finished ways or on a different scale, or more polished elements may be substituted, held within rough-hewn casings. Work comes about sequentially, lands during the activity rather than at the beginning or end of it, continues to ask questions of itself.

Drawing comparisons with the larger scale works, what’s immediately interesting is the difference in scale, but there’s also an interesting symmetry with the SPG work in the way they relate to ideas of exterior and interior worlds and materials.

I began working on a small scale over the last few years – when concerns over materials, shipping & storing work were fast-tracked by the pandemic, and the new edition echoes the scale of works like ‘hold’ from the Cample line show, and the shift in scale from monumental pieces in a vast landscape of potential, to small pieces that could be held with one hand and look inward.

These small trays – enclosures – I felt could better reflect the converging of environment that happened during lockdown. It feels wild to still be referring to that. Everything was domestic/was made in the domestic. An extreme moment but happening for many in other circumstances – this hemming in, duties of care & making mixed, compromised in an impossibly precarious balancing act, assuming and further separating aspects of identity to fulfil a multitude of roles.

I felt compelled to use those materials readily available, & otherwise wasted, like posted packaging, tin foil and household paints, while working from home. By extension, it was practical to include activity not deemed as artistic. These activities were made impossible to separate in more palpable ways as prior. 

Repairing & cleaning, cooking, plastering and painting, making & mothering, scattered and serious conversations. With friends and within families of people, structures blown apart and recast. The reassessment & fracture of selfdom over those years that all had a tangible impact. The work for SPG is made of this stuff…

During the subtle knife show (Baltic) you spoke about the interior as an extension of self, how your work incorporates a more biographical use of space – how our interior spaces represent ourselves. It being about the interior world inside us as much as inside physical spaces. How do you feel this project with SPG connects to this discourse?

When I was 18 I read Woolf’s A room of one’s own which framed the question of women & art within the field of exclusion, of the physical boundaries that confine, the obstructions to thought & action. And the counter, that a ‘containing space’ or physical enclosure could be ultimately enabling, in the example of Emily Dickinson’s bedroom (as described by Diana Fuss) since it allowed freedom from duties, and through the written word she could take part in a larger more sprawling and energising network.

Stein wrote – The 19th century might describe a building or display window in precise detail as if it stood still before them. The modernists perception of the same building gave the impression however of speed, blocks of colour, glimpses of bits and pieces that never cohere. The drag upon the sense, the lag between what we can see or sense. In Melanctha (1905) she developed the continuous present where the narrative moves so slowly or repeats itself so often, as if past, present and future coexisted. This offers a parallel to my relationship to the structural questioning of form in literature and outwith, in relation to time – not only a particular time that works against the obliteration of movement.

Literature has prompted or scaffolded much of my work of the last 2 decades. Every work I have made since that moment with Woolf has been in a sense an estimation of that physical boundary, closed door, a fathoming of inside & out of it – a commitment to understanding the specificity of form – what network is it, what rules govern it? It has engaged me in projects around modernist materialism, the book as talisman of the self, understanding form through materialism, interiority & containment in terms of a construction of subjectivity. 

What about writing, what are you reading atm? 

I’m rereading Derek Jarman’s Chroma, written a year before Jarman’s death, but for me (and hopefully not to diminish it) it offers up natural remedies to better understand many things – shedding light and shadow on matter & medium – now and through ancient history by describing abstracts, transient nature subordinate to certain subjectivities.

‘Circles of a Stone, and sea defences.

And then I added the rust brown scrap,

A float, a malin and old tank trap.

Dig in your soul with the compost from Lydd,

Cuttings, Division are placed in frames,

Protected from rabbits with neat wood cones’

(Green Fingers, p51, Chroma Vintage Jarman 1994)

And I’ve just read Hello Friend We Missed You, by Richard Owain Roberts. I’m often asking – what can I learn from the language I think – where is the space in writing?

In this case, perhaps it’s something about what happens in the repetition of speech and language between characters Hill and Trudy and Hill’s terminally ill father (Roger) – sculpturally and in terms of adding noise, slippage or subtext, trace – quite an interesting notion in relation to making multiples in this project through sculptural editioning. 

The sparsity of the narrative asks what is essential to the work? How does that gesture translate to spatial sparsity or density and what kinds of language & speech play companion to any situation, reduced to the point of abstraction?

Gertrude Stein

From the time she moved to France in 1903 until her death in Neuilly-sur-Seine in 1946, American writer Gertrude Stein was a central figure in the Parisian art world. An advocate of the avant garde, Stein helped shape an artistic movement that demanded a novel form of expression and a conscious break with the past. The Paris salon at 27 rue de Fleurus that she shared with Alice B. Toklas, her lifelong companion and secretary, became a gathering place for the “new moderns,” as the talented young artists supporting this movement came to be called. Among those whose careers she helped launch were painters Henri Matisse, Juan Gris, and Pablo Picasso. What these creators achieved in the visual arts, Stein attempted in her writing. A bold experimenter and self-proclaimed genius, she rejected the linear, time-oriented writing characteristic of the 19th century for a spatial, process-oriented, specifically 20th-century literature. The results were dense poems and fictions, often devoid of plot or dialogue, which yielded memorable phrases (“Rose is a rose is a rose”) but were not commercially successful books. In fact, her only bestseller, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, a memoir of Stein’s life written in the person of Toklas, was a standard narrative, conventionally composed.

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Derek Jarman

In 1976 he made his first feature film, the blissfully homoerotic Sebastiane. This was followed by the irreverent Jubilee (1977), one of the first and only punk films, firmly establishing Jarman as an underground hero. An unconventional and controversial adaptation of The Tempest in 1979 cemented this reputation. Jarman’s best known and most accessible work is 1986’s Caravaggio, a fictionalised account of the life of the Baroque artist, and the first time Jarman worked with Tilda Swinton.

Jarman couldn’t help but react to the society he was living in, the country that was becoming Thatcher’s Britain. His answer to the iron lady was to produce iconoclastic art – art that looked at history but was located in the here and now.Alongside his feature films he worked with key musicians and artists of the day, including The Smiths, Bryan Ferry, The Sex Pistols, punk band Throbbing Gristle, The Pet Shop Boys, Suede and dancer Michael Clark, producing music videos and film installations for live shows.

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Richard Owain Roberts

Richard Owain Roberts was born and raised on Ynys Môn, the isle of Anglesey, and now lives in Cardiff. A native Welsh speaker, Richard read English at Manchester University, and graduated with Distinction from a Masters in Creative Writing from Liverpool John Moores University. He has worked delivering leaflets and as a teacher in Cardiff Prison, and has published short stories and non-fiction in VICE, The Quietus, 3:AM Magazine, For Every Year, Word Riot, the Guardian and the New Welsh Review. He has published 2 works of fiction, All The Places We Lives (Parthian Books: 2015) and The Guardian’s Not The Booker Prize winner for 2020.

Check out his 2020 novel  Hello Friend We Missed You.