Guido, I wish that you and Lupo and I
Were carried off by magic
1#2I82-3: Book of Skulls and Bones
As a teenager, I bought into the whole business of denim jackets, long hair and air-guitars. My elder brother, Sam, who was, by contrast, a new wave fan, used to take the piss out of my metal fixation, as did my parents. My family are all quite opinionated people, and still are. I didn’t care. I was going progressively into my shell – only listening to metal records and continuing to ignore all and sundry. Sam found me one day drawing in this scrapbook…Drawings of skulls: hundreds of skulls and skull motifs. – The pleats in the armchair in my room sketched with skulls, skulls on the handles of the drawers of my desk; skull and bones dancing in my snow ball and Christmas nativity; skulls it seems everywhere, including the moth-eaten ears of my old teddy. Sam thought I was a freak. I don’t think he was far wrong.
2#4G85: Book of Anatomy
I got the idea from the Doc who worked in Accident and Emergency; the people in the sketchbook where either on the foundation course or friends from school. The cover is decorated with skull and bones, of course. This is again a recurring motif in the sketchbook. For example, there is a sketch of a hand – as it turns out Jimmy’s hand clasping the neck of a whisky bottle; skulls and bones are hidden in the label. Each sketch is numbered with Roman numerals (another obsession – which I didn’t really understand at the time). The sketch of Suzy’s arm and hand has been transformed so she is sitting on a sofa with tiny skulls and bones, but you only see this if you look very closely. There is a sketch of Julia wearing a scarf with different ideas. For example, in one sketch the frill has been given bones. In another there is a tiny skull in the folds of the scarf. Only the sketch of Maggie remains untouched by the skull obsession. It seems, on the surface at least, a “normal” nude – I’m proud of the way I’ve caught the way her breasts slope as she lies on the bed. On second thoughts, there is an air of finger-licking dissipation about it.
3#5D96: Bookcase Series
The curators wanted me to put these bookcases here to carry on the book theme. I found one bookcase in a skip in London; the other two I made in Barcelona out of oak that I was reliably informed came from a room being revamped in the House of Lords. I’ve always been a fan of second-hand bookshops and charity shops. I found most of the books in London, but one or two were from Paris or Brussels. The dust-jackets are all done with felt tip. I also liked the idea of prime numbers. The books themselves were personal milestones in my reading matter, but it could be argued that they also reflect choice of location and theme: Fear is the Key (3 copies, Gaza Strip, 1999); To Spare the Conquered (5 copies, Sarajevo, 2003); Foucault’s Pendulum (7 copies, City of Science, Valencia 2010).
4#3H97: Neolithic Snail
The main piece of my degree show; the idea I stole I confess from Matisse. It’s like a blown up and multi-coloured patchwork snail of a Neolithic crouch burial. I put on panels the photos I’d taken of the crouch burial from the display in the local municipal museum, but those have been lost.
5#1L92: Yellow van
The yellow van abandoned on an urban street (Brixton, 1992). The Polaroids of country scenes (notably, old stomping grounds: Durdle Door and Chesil Beach, Dorset) have been glued to the dashboard. Gum boots and a pair of old jeans have been left on the back seat. At that time, I was working as a council gardener, and I hated art and the art world. This was how I felt abandoned, lost.
6#3C95: Third Piece
I like the darkness in this piece, the general sense of obscurity in the colours. As a rule, I never worked with brush and paint, but I hope you can appreciate the different shades. I also love the huge canvas. I always thought of it as my third piece… Why after Yellow Van and the Neolithic Snail I began to take what I was doing seriously again. I’d got my degree and was beginning to get my head down and do some serious work.
This brings me to the angels:
7#5F97: Berlin Angel (Alexanderplatz, 1997): male mannequin with butterfly wings, and
8#4K98: London Angel (Centre Point, 1998): female mannequin with moth wings.
I found the mannequins on skips. The male mannequin lacks an arm; the female mannequin lacks a leg. Both moth wings and butterfly wings have been designed out of a patchwork of fabrics over improvised wire frames. I have always been pleased with these pieces – they were in a way a tribute to a friend who had disappeared. I still hope one day to see him.
9#7E00: The Rock Garden Series
My first rock garden was installed in Oslo and the second in Stockholm. The Berlin Rock Garden was the third in the series, and personally, I think, the most successful. It is a shrine to memory both collective and personal. First, after the poster in my brother’s room are these medallions of indie idols hanging from rocks. Icons stuck to rocks! My obsession with archaeological remains is present as before. In the new rock garden I have placed a manger in the rocks with a crouch burial. The work also reflects an appreciation of Latin tags: “Animum vincere”, which is a beautifully compressed asyntagym involving “clementia” “temperentia” and “mansuetudo”. (By the way, for the strange ambient sounds recorded on the crackly old tape you hear in the background, I am indebted to my old friend, Charlie Drake.)
Around 2000 I moved abroad. I travelled a lot in those years, particularly in Italy, where Mercedes, my future wife was doing a post-grad in Art criticism.
10#8G01: Bath House Mural (Trastevere, Rome, 2001)
Here, visual puns are reflected in verbal ones. I love the idea of the intrusion of the snow room, since there were never any snow rooms in Roman Baths.
11#6H02: Beach mat, flip flops, Egnazia, southern Italy, 2002
I have always liked the ambiguity of this piece. Are we dealing with someone who has just gone for a swim? Will they ever come back? Incidentally, there are great archaeological remains in Egnazia.
12#5A05: The Lovely Dolls (1999 – 2005)
Mercedes my wife and I were in a flea market in Uruguay where we came across all these dolls in boxes. Some lacked limbs or heads. Barbies on Back Seat: one is dressed as a kind of superwoman in crotchless panties, the other naked but for a pair of white moon or snow boots, lying in a state of abandon on the back seat of what might be a stretch limo. The white leather upholstery is ripped and torn in places as if after a night of debauch. Little Big Man first appears in 2000 as a Harley Davidson biker. He has had a number of costumes changes over the years comprising a Zorro mask, a thong, a body builder’s leotard, a padded black posing pouch, a hairy mat, a Venetian carnival mask. I built the set for him out of cardboard and polystyrene. The set is falling apart, but I kind of like that anyway. Little Big Man is getting old, and doesn’t know it.
12#2B06: Two Bobbies
Twinning and replication are for me signs of human longing. The portraits morph into each other until one is no longer aware who one is looking at: Bobby Ewing, the fictional Texan oilman. Or Bobby Keys the delightfully game saxophonist (also, coincidentally, with his roots in Texas).
13#8J09: Book of Constellations
In recent years I have begun to cultivate an interest in the stars and constellations. In the Book of Constellations, the night sky has been painted from various positions around the globe (Machu Pichu (2005), Montpellier, France (2008), Casablanca, Tunisia (2009). Though the brushwork is deliberately naïf, I really can’t paint. Anyway, I like the size of the canvases, the fact that for this exhibition they are all in one room. And it’s as if you’re looking at one big night sky.
14#6I10: Message in a Bottle
Here you can see the video of the bottle launch. We launched the bottles from the fishing smack over different days. It was all going well until the day the storm got up. The waves were huge. They gave us a bit of a fright. Neither Mercedes or I wanted to go back out the following day. So we decided to give the bottles away to friends who were going on weekend trips to the Azures or holidays to Russia. I like to think someone somewhere will be reading a message on the Volga or the Don. And some of those bottles will have crossed the Atlantic. But I will not tell you what the message says. You will have to find the bottle.