Interview by Madeleine Morley

July 2015

Edit - http://postmatter.com/#/currents/fragmentary-alchemy

With the Rare Earth sculptures and the accompanying websites, you’ve created a fictitious world that mirrors our own. Why did you decide to create such an all-encompassing fiction that extends into realms beyond the gallery? And are the sculptures catalysts for the stories, or do the stories put the sculptures into context?

A common criticism, especially of Art which involves the internet and other modes of viewership or context is that it can fail to engage a first time viewing gallery audience leaving them lost with the feeling that the work is somewhere else. I think my work is caught in a tension between taxonomy, logocentric presentations and their opposites, say modes of presentation which avoid categorical reductionist outputs and become more indefinable, unnamable and ungraspable.

My intention is to develop what I call Sculptural Systems;  what this essentially means is that there is no single privileged viewer of the work but there are multiple points of perspective or access. In this regard, I’m trying to think and work from a place that does not privilege the human viewer but rather sees the ‘audience’ as just another agent or component which co-creates the amorphous nature of the sculptural system . I don’t intentionally try to create tolkienesque fictions and other worlds which mirror our own reality, the motivation is somewhat the opposite. I dont want to make sculptures with stories behind them but I do want to black box complex co-evolving systems of activity and interchange in the ‘real world’ which penetrate different interfaces and co-adapt to their changing environment. I see what I’m doing as already there and preexistent and I’m trying to weave or knit a plastic sculptural network from various novel agents, creating even more novelty.

The way I think about this is that there are primary nuclear components to each ‘piece’ but the emphasis on what is swirling around these nuclei are so strong its impossible to understand the nucleus without the outer parts which are intrinsically bound to it - it’s just that you might be zoomed in too far to see them, which is ok, say in a gallery. Those outer parts give it mass and gravity, they bind its meaning; they form a constellation which gives it a modular plasticity but I wouldn't necessarily want to make visible all of those outer parts of the sculptural system in a gallery environment. This is a way of creating timeless artefacts, of representing reality, of carving stone or marble, or at least trying to within such precarious conditions

They often end up being projects within projects within projects. The horizontal lines which you can see on my website separate my bodies of work into different periods. Right now I’m in the Energy Pangea / Rare Earth Sculpture Project period which is proving to be quite a wide time scale. Some Rare Earth Sculptures have separate pieces which form part of the sculptural system, for example the Darky Psy Energy Pack in Terbium and the handheld burial accessories in Thulium. They all form part of a whole but also act autonomously.

I’m interested in your use of corporate rhetoric and also your references to the New Age movement. What is the relationship between the two? (And how do you explore this relationship in your work?)

There is an emphasis on slick corporate post-minimalism interbred with late 90’s - early 00s era y2k paranoia, diy internet conspiracy room-full-of-crazy hyper-intensity homepages made by self-proclaimed ‘experts’ whilst being into all the latest brands and consumer tech. There’s a reason for this of course and it's probably generational circumstance. I grew up in small village in South West England, my Mum had all these books in the downstairs toilet on ancient aliens and government cover ups of UFO’s, my Nan suffered migraine with aura and would have celestial visions and was a remote healer, my parents had a business which sold hearing aids, they had a home office where the dial up internet was, AOL, laminator, corporate knickknacks sent to us by the large hearing aid companies. I would go to Bristol and buy Fila basketball trainers and kappa and adidas gear. As I get older I realise more and more the impact all of this had on me, I think living in a rural area made this all the more intense and I want my work to have a sense of urgency because I’m drawn to conspiracy and pseudoscientific thinking and brands and the latest products and the language around them, I think it’s very primal and I’m aware of that, so I try to present it whilst acknowledging my own irrational mind.

I started saying that my work was a parody of research practice because I wanted to be clear about what it’s really about, which is, at its core, experimenting with materials and forms. These materials are often informational, speculative, hypothetical, non-localised, emergent and fragmentary. I think it’s important that there is emphasis on this as a practice over say research and context, over concept also, because today all contemporary art is research led whilst also being conceptual and context driven, so I wouldn't want to privilege those things.

This is the first project since 2010, and the first within the rare earth series that has no textual component. Its interesting that you ask this question because with all of the rare earth sculptures, if you want to know the concept behind the then piece the text is pretty much going to frame it for you, though the idea behind those texts is that it’s part of the work’s formal vocabulary and it programs its context, hopefully opening up a debate or connecting to other entities.

With the previous two sculptures before Terbium I started to experiment with different ways of formulating the textual component, like almost callously throwing words at it. Some words seems random and misplaced, others are very specific and integral to what I want the work to do. And then that formula pretty much broke down. Context is central to the way i’m working on these projects, so the role of the text was often to connect the object(s) to a wider system of relations - for instance, to what Timothy Morton termed Hyper Objects.

Terbium was very much a pattern based tautological exploration of connection and meaning that ended up becoming what it inevitably is, a consequence is that it’s quite dark and ambiguous. The first part I started with was the small mud figure (mud owl). Whilst visiting my parents who live near the Bristol Channel, I went to the beach and gathered the estuary mud and made that thing. Over a year or so I started thinking about building a megastructure for the mud owl which would act as a temple/palace/tomb to hold it, to honor it. The building of this structure is an exploration of Xavier Séguin’s project Eden Saga, dark forest psytrance and many of the things you mention ; alchemical formulas I’v been exploring since this whole project began and terbium utilised vibration resonance technology which spreads sound onto a surface. Working with Goch was a big part of the project in regards to forming context and meaning. So the outcome, I hope says a lot more than a text could express.

Im working on a new project for Praseodymium which takes as its starting point a GCHQ document leaked by Edward Snowden called The Art Of Deception - Training For A new Generation Of Online Covert Operations. This is basically a workshop to train secret service personnel how to spread ambiguity, confusion and misinformation on the internet with the aim to disrupt certain groups or individuals who are enemies of the government, it’s essentially a PSYOP and harnesses how the internet already operates. I’m interested operations such as CIA agents who give false information to ufologists and groups which expend vast amounts of affective labour on creating fake ufo sightings, the shock doctrine, the recent situation with the Greece, the IMF and Eurozone,  all of these things channeling into the realm of double, triple, quadruple bluffing and weird hysterias and collective psychosis. I want to push this, somehow, somewhere. Its early development.