I guess our first encounter with things is in their appearance. In a way, these encounters are very incomplete or unsatisfactory, especially, if we are wanting to know the objective world that we are walking through, as opposed to the subjective world that we think is out there. I am interested in dealing with the world I encounter in the real, that's actual, as opposed to imagined. When I am making a piece, I encounter the components of the work as images first. However, when I bring them into the studio I don’t want to deal with images. I want to deal with the reality of the object itself, which might differ from what I am told it’s about or what we collectively agree that these images mean. In this sense, I am really interested in the way I use the objective world of objects to understand my subjectivity. So when I am working I try to eliminate the subjectivity for a while so that a different story can enter and that story will have a lot more to do with the material or the actuality of the objects themselves.
When I am out looking for objects to work with, I will pick up something that is very minor in its suggestiveness or it’s calling out to me. Often, these are not expensive things, they are not valuable, and they are not treasurable or collectable items. They are ubiquitous, they are common, and I can get them almost for nothing at thrift stores. I then bring them to the studio and see where I can interrupt their socially assigned trajectory and If I can’t interrupt it, I can send it back into the waste stream.
One thing I want to do is not entertain nostalgia because nostalgia is really just a repetition of a story, a repetition of the meaning of the work or what your relationship is to it. I don't want to do that. I want to sever that as much as possible. That’s the main reason I reissue the images in a different material. In my current exhibition, ‘The Rise and Fall’ at Focal Point Gallery in Southend-on-Sea, there is a large lion titled ‘Coiffed’, which would have been quite a large toy for a child. For this, I made a mould of that toy and I cast it in rubber in a different colour. Not a natural colour - not a tawny beautiful lion - but a weird blue colour with white hair and black eyes. I have disrupted its qualities because I don’t want to entertain nostalgia and because I don’t want to repeat that common human story of ‘here’s what this is’, ‘here’s what this means’, ‘here’s what I used to feel towards this and want to keep feeling over and over and over again.’ That’s a kind of pathology I am not interested in.
Maybe it's a new emotion, maybe it’s a variant of an old emotion but with a new aspect to it. I also don’t want to predict, it's not as though I am trying to direct a viewer to a specific place, I am just trying to break a habit - break a pattern. The work is always about how we feel, where our emotional territory interacts with the material world and the way we use the material world to understand our emotional landscape and I am wanting to expand it or make a larger spectrum.
As strongly as I want to kill nostalgia, I would like to kill sentiment. It's very hard to kill sentimental tendencies, but there is a difference between sentiment and sentimentality. Sentiment to me is a human feeling, you have feelings and they are sentiments. Sentimentality is the repetition and then the degradation of a feeling so that you take a feeling that is complete, necessary and legitimate and valuable and you sort of flog it as a trope or a tendency. So, sentimentality no, sentiment yes.
Usually, I bring the object in and denature it in the studio by making a mould and casting it in a different material. I don't have a destination. Instead, I am trying to get closer to the real, through manipulation of the thing at hand. I will find the object that’s on a very slight notion, I will make a mould of it very hastily and I’ll cast it with not much expectation of success. Everything is kind of hasty and intuitive and hopeful, but not super intentional. During the process, I make a series of decisions towards its making and then as this image starts to change and become a new object in my studio, it begins to suggest relationships with other things I am either looking at or working with in that moment. I very usually have a thing that I have made in the studio form a relationship with another thing that I have found, that goes through no process at all.
Yes, in the case ‘Coiffed’, on the platform where you encounter the blue lion, there is a number of little girls’ treasure box, the kind of box you would keep your juvenile jewellery in or special stuff, little buttons or whatever else.
It eventually has to stop. We are not polyamorous here in the studio! It has to call something with a good relationship but it may call and cancel multiple times before it finds it.
Being a sculptor I have this problem with the presentation. Because gravity is a big part of the practice, things have to sit someplace and I don't want them on plinths - that is a big rule - as that will separate them from the rest of your environment. I want them to be coexistent with all the objects in your life. Sometimes with sculpture, the beauty of it is that it is coexistent with other objects and you have a little more trouble discerning where it begins and where it ends. Whereas with painting it is fairly obvious, and in that way more intellectual, because you have to make an agreement, that this is artwork on the wall, not dealing with gravity. As an artist, I want to acknowledge the difference between an object and an image. I am sort of making images but I want them to maintain their object-ness and to do this I have to find a way to present them. I often borrow display methods that you might see objects being presented to you. In the case of the lion (‘Coiffed, 2020’), I was thinking of flea markets. I have been to many flea markets where the vendors just put their stuff on the ground. They are doing my job, they are putting things together that don't belong together - and when you look at them and there is a new cosmology of meaning. So maybe they are the best sculptors I know!
I am interested in attraction, you know the feeling that you have of wanting to go close to something or look at something. So you're going through a lot of things and then some small percentage of the things you pass every day, ask you to get closer. What is that? What is it about that thing that makes you want to get closer? I respond to that in the first place, so I consider that a vivaciousness, I consider that a living thing. I go towards it and I feel alive. I take that thing to the studio and I start to work with it and weirdly I kill the life out of it, it's not what I want to do, but suddenly the life thing goes. I don't know, maybe I am paying too much attention to it. Then I have to retrieve that spark and I do that through more manipulation and I keep working till I get that life back. I go from life to death to life again and I’ll just keep working on it until I feel that attraction again.
Vancouver is a primary resource area, there aren’t a lot of factories. It is more like logging, fishing and mining. It's a resource extraction place. Many of the older industries took place outside of the city, so the city is quite clean and cute. It's very attractive because of its physical location and now it's sort of a lifestyle place, with lots of coffee shops and shopping. It has been an influence, but of course, I have grown up here. I only notice it when I go to older places, like Europe and I think ‘Oh I get it, these places have stories that have been going on for centuries’. We really havent got that. In terms of settler culture, it’s only 150 years old, so things are kind of raw and unprocessed. I think a lot of that cultural context is what made me start to be an artist in the first place. I don't know that I could have been an artist if I grew up in Paris or Italy, I would feel kind of suffocated. In Vancouver, I felt like I was dealing with a sort of dearth, or an emptiness or nothingness and that I needed to produce meaning, so I just started doing that.
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