Articles in Interviews

Hanna Haaslahti Interviewed - Part 1 / October 28, 2015

CM: Who are the artists, thinkers, theorists from any field of endeavour that you most admire and which have had the greatest impact on your thinking and your work? 

HH:  Many people influence my work and thinking as research is an important part of my working process.  At the moment, Timothy Morton, an English philosopher who writes about object-oriented ontology (OOO) is of particular interest. The idea that objects comprise both surface and essence – the surface/appearance being easily comprehensible while the essence can never be seen or known is somehow magical and endlessly sought after.  
Discovering gestalt psychology was a revelation for me. It explains how brain processes our perceptions of the world by filling in missing gaps and creating whole forms, before our cognitive mind has a chance to intervene. Our minds are constantly produced by our brains.   I am also fascinated by studies around the psychology of the group and phenomena surrounding the ‘herd mentality’.  
Malevich is an artist whose work and manifestos, are for me an iconic turning point in thought and image.  The utopian architectural constructions of Haus Rucker-Co made in the 1970s at a time of increased fear of environmental issues incorporated plastics into their pneumatic air structures interest me for their use of material and for the way they wanted to provide creative solutions to environmental and social issues.  Today we do not have room for utopias – we are the generation that has to clean up the trash from the past and move on.  I also admire Bjőrk for her energy and her imagination. 

CM: You have created work which responds to historically important places in the past for example Sincere Lies, 2013 at Sinebrychoff Museum of Old Art in Helsinki.  What aspects of the historic appeal to you?

HH:  Certain ideas are associated with certain historical periods – there has always been a manipulation or control of what we know, what is passed down, what is revered and what is not discussed and in this sense history is a perceptual formula. I am interested in the ‘back streets of history’, not the official line.  Our age, the digital age, is characterised by a flow (or flood) of information stated quickly and simply – which does not describe a true or fair view of the complexity of an event. I am interested in presenting the possibilities of alternative narratives – not necessarily based on research or re-presenting facts – new information does not help – after all information is not communication. I am talking about different ways of perceiving the world.  The images you see every day in the media make you blind and powerless, but sometimes you catch a glimpse of something revealing. Take the image of the new Chief Executive of BMW who dramatically fainted at the conference – an image which went viral.  The pose is almost religious, the fall so out of place, it revealed human fragility so carefully hidden inside the machineries of power.  

CM: Tell me about the importance of digital technology and the possibilities it opens up in the visual world?

HH: Digital technology introduced instability as the unexpected side-effect of high-tech society.  Objects are no longer solid and enduring, buildings are made to last a decade rather than millennia, events seemingly take place here, on the other side of the world and on various platforms simultaneously as do images of ourselves.  Instantaneous, ephemeral, speeded up digital world – we are not sure how to understand this new dimension of immateriality.   Concepts of physical presence and absence have dissolved – now we are present all the time in different ways in different media – images of ourselves are on social media, sent back and forth, selfies everywhere.   Our paranoia about surveillance cameras seems to have disappeared and now we suffer from FOMO; we throw ourselves into the proliferation of images and now we live with our own digital images constantly.  Next year I am embarking on an art+science research project in Aalto University, Helsinki called ‘Life as an image’ to explore new technologies around image making and 3D sensing and their social reverberations.  The relationship between human perception and computer vision – how computers see the world - is fascinating.  3D sensing technology adds another element to the RGB of image creation - the D of Depth – also called point cloud - which dispenses with traditional perspectival systems of vision.  3D sensing moves around the object and builds up an image from all angles.  Liberating image making from the chains of perspective is exciting and contains many possibilities. 
I am positive about digital technology - we cannot turn back the clock and it is here to stay so there is no point being negative about it or yearning for analogue technology.  But we can and should try to take control of it.  We are in a honeymoon period of intense love with our social screens, creating a generation of young iPhone zombies as we say in Finland but I am hopeful that technology might lead ultimately to a new understanding of time, presence and materiality. 

Written by Claire Mander
Interviews April 29, 2019

Hanna Haaslahti Interviewed - Part 2 / November 12, 2015

CM: How did you approach your Sculpture Shock residency and making the work?

HH: Not in front of a computer screen.  Chiswick House and English Heritage have been very supportive and I have spent many days at the Temple, in the archives and in the grounds. The history of the Ionic Temple is fascinating and many layered.  As with all historical research, as many things are hidden as are revealed. Just as the obelisk that stands in front of it, the Temple itself is a monument and monuments are selective in their statements about past deeds.
Certain aspects of the Temple caught my imagination: the empty niches in the interior; the armless sculptures in the grounds and the idea of building a bridge between the past and present – of invigorating a space which is not open to the public. 

The two empty niches in the Temple once contained copies of classical sculptures now in the main house. Replicas of these stand in the gardens outside the Temple area. They have lost their arms and hands – their gestures – and without them the sculptures have lost their means of communication.  I wanted to study gestures of classical sculpture to link past and present by incorporating them into the installation. The concept of ‘heroic nudity’ invented during Archaic period resonates strongly with contemporary anxieties surrounding beauty and the toning of muscles.  These same gestures reappear again and again in sculpture over the millennia and now they float in their contemporary incarnation on the surface of the mirror pond. Certain visual effects just keep repeating themselves throughout history.  

Much of the apparent richness of the interiors of Chiswick House is due to its carefully gilded surfaces. This interested me as I primarily work with light which creates a similar type of surface effect.  Gilding, though, is a way of making materials look more desirable and expensive – creating this rift between the surface and the essence.  I decided to invert this treatment and re-cover the solid materials of the Temple with a contemporary non-precious, artificial looking material.  So much of the contemporary world is made up of cheap fake things mimicking old precious things – like cheap vinyl oak-looking floors or fake marble tiles which I wanted to make the viewer think about.  I wanted to create an installation which highlights the disjunct between the solidity of this grand building and the instability of the contemporary world.

CM: How do you hope your Sculpture Shock intervention for the Ionic Temple at Chiswick House will be read by its audience and what impact do you hope it will have?

HH: The audience is the key link between the building and my work and between past and present. The interactive light work will ensure that visitors are in the spotlight, if only for a moment. They will be the fulcrum of the work – actually generating and moving the light.  
The audience is not passive – they will not just stand and watch – their function is to challenge the border between installation, viewer and site. I hope their perceptions will be altered and they will be animated by the space as much as they animate it themselves.

CM: How has Sculpture Shock assisted you in the development of you practice and
what are your artistic ambitions? 

HH: This program really opened a new perspective in my artistic practice.I had labeled myself as a media artist and now I have a broader sense of what I do.  Why do we have to have these divisions anyway?  As an artist I want to be able to always do whatever is necessary.

Written by Claire Mander
April 29, 2019

William Mackrell Interviewed - Part 1 / August 11, 2015

ZK: What made you decide to become a sculptor and when did your interest in performance develop? 

WM: The fluidity of working from a sculptural perspective has always appealed to me. Much of my work doesn’t follow a particular medium, its Sculpture’s looseness that embraces my shifting process and the varying materials both made and readymade that I work with. Though sculpture is probably the closest category I identify with, I actually started out studying Painting for my BA when I was at Chelsea College of art, but even over the course I could see my approach to working was moving quickly into the realms of installation and sculpture. Yet the work now still retains a strong relationship to my background in painting and also very much drawing. It’s the immediacy of mark making, putting down an initial gesture or a thought that stays central to my work.

I fell into Performance quite accidently and only really began to recognise my work as performative or as actions in around 2009 / 2010.  Around that time I made a work called 1000 Candles, which was a response to a pocket torch I had in my studio that claimed to have 1000 candles power. I attempted to assemble 1000 candles in my studio and light them all. This turned out to be very difficult, I couldn’t reach, it got very hot, and then of course as soon as you got near the end, one would go out and you’d be faced with the decision whether to stop lighting or continue. When I first made that piece I had only ever thought about it as being a photograph that documented this task, but when I got a video camera next and started filming the work, it really stopped me to think about its physicality, the duration and power of the sound. I realised this work was full with the potential of performance. So in a way I guess the performance aspect of my work was introduced through video and more precisely the moment of sensing the work from the other, seeing it on screen, this altered viewpoint helped me to feel the piece as a live work that move beyond a static image. In fact that’s what I really like about performance, that it started freeing the work to be ‘it is what it is’ rather than trying to be ‘Art’.

But, to confuse things further, I had actually been making performances long before then, but hadn’t thought of them as anything more than a shot at finding a solution to a problem. In 2006 I was invited along with thirty artists to a tiny island, Susak in the Adriatic to see what might happen in a completely unfamiliar and isolated location. It was an idyllic place to be, but with all these artists it soon turned into an intense and claustrophobic atmosphere, a lot of people fell out. Everyday it became more like a Big Brother scenario, so I tried to escape for an afternoon by borrowing a table, umbrella and chairs from one of the two bars on the island and carried them into the sea in the hope to begin a conversation offshore. Soon locals and others from the project joined with more chairs and then the guy working in the bar waded out and asked if we’d like some drinks? That was probably the first performance to happen unintentionally, but in retrospect it holds a lot of value to me now for how I approach collective and participatory projects.

ZK: Who are the artists and theorists you most admire and who have had the greatest impact on your thinking and your work?

WM: When I was at Chelsea, my tutor Angela de la Cruz was hugely influential in breaking down my work. She really helped guide me to find my way with my language. We are still in regular contact and Angela remains as direct as ever about new work. I admire her as a good friend and the most uncompromising artist I know.

Of course other figures I hugely admire are; Joseph Beuys, his appetite for art as teaching, the blackboard pieces are great and then his shamanistic activities have always added this twist to his mystic personality. Bas Jan Ader and filmmaker Andreas Tarkovsky are also strong influences for me. Their works delve deep into the poetic, political and absurdities of humanity. Also Paul McCarthy, particularly his early video works, which really bring out the madness of being an artist in the studio, some of those works resonate so politically about their time and again the folly of man. 

The two theorists I have been looking at a lot recently, both particularly useful to the ambulatory residency, Henri Lefebvre and Paul Virilio. Lefebvre’s Rhythmanalysisbrings together the overlooked connectivity of rhythm, time, and movement in the everyday. This book has been in continuous use in the last few months, and Virilio’s, The Aesthetics of Disappearance unravels the delicate juncture between dreaming and being awake in the dizzying and relentless speed of 24-7 culture.  For me both texts are really interesting precursors to today’s rapid age of the Internet and how time feel’s lived through a flow of images on screens, forming a kind of constant time of perpetual wakefulness.

ZK: When did your interest in the site specific develop and how/where did this happen? Can you talk a little about what you would define as a site-specific work as and how performance, which doesn’t always have a fixed location, fits into this?

WM: It certainly starts from the body being central to or itself site specific. The intervention that culminates from this residency in early September called, Gaps, glitches and speed bumps will be an interrelated piece between the internal and external effect of the mechanics of bus travel on the body. Looking at airflow and the way air moves through your lungs on the bus, how your diaphragm is affected by the reverberations and vibrations it creates, and then how your body is almost thrown into a spherical direction by the bus in transit.

It’s a hybrid of body and site that makes Gaps, glitches and speed bumps site specific. It is also about the rhythm of the city as a site of flow and the disruption to this flow by the traffic lights, negotiating other vehicles and then there are the constant automated announcements by the reassuring but assertive female voice on the overhead loudspeaker that form marker points on the journey. The whole thing is about how time is always moving and in a way addresses the fact that the site specific itself is more often than not a temporary experience.

I guess my interest in the site specific started around the same time as my interest in performance developed, around 2010. The site specific has always just really been there, I don’t really know how to work without it, because I feel like it’s intrinsic to producing work. Whatever I am producing it is always in reaction to a particular time and space and the set of circumstances that goes with this.

Written by Zana Kingwill
April 29, 2019

William Mackrell Interviewed - Part 2 / September 7, 2015

ZK: As chance encounters and happenings appear to be such an important part of your practice, what kind of preparation and planning goes into each of your pieces?

WM: Preparing involves rehearsing the context of a site or situation. With the upcoming public performance being worked towards for September, Gaps, glitches and speed bumps, the singers will have nothing to follow or fall back on, responding instinctively to how their bodies mould with the fluctuating movement of each journey. As my work often tilts speculatively between the possible and the unlikely, chance tends to enter into the work and carries the piece beyond its original intentions. It is this extension of the work by the unexpected that can break the work out of a singular construct or pre-intended point of view. Being able to adapt quickly to change and work out solutions is to keep moving, keep something alive, that’s inherent to everyday living.

Last June when Deux Chevaux was performed in London, in order for the work to fulfil its funding agreements it became utterly engrossed in licences, permissions and negotiations to a point that cocooned the activity of the work from its own precarious being. In some ways it was an interesting learning curve as I didn’t realise in advance the extent of the administrational work, which would amount to some 800 emails and 100-200 pages of police and local authorities documents carried on the day of the performance, particularly for something which in terms of its action appeared quite straight forward and common place just over one hundred years ago. By the end of the Deux Chevaux performance, the paperwork had so dominated my experience of the work I included all the documents in the final exhibition, Steam Horses at The Ryder as a swarm of paper stuffed onto a pin board.

For Gaps, glitches and speed bumps, I have tried to keep the administrative element to a minimum, with the intention to keep the performance as loose and fluid as possible within the everyday scenario of the city’s public travel network. The focus will be entirely absorbed in the very second when the bus is jolting along and the affect this will have on the singers’ vocal responses and line drawings made on each journey.

ZK: What is the importance of the audience experience to you and how do you hope your work will impact on those who witness your performances?

WM: Considering your audience is necessary, as the live element of the work hinges on how you invite or position the audience within a live dialogue. Whether the work will be liked or not is something I cannot decide, but how they might reach the project, begin to enter into it, has to be thought about and for Gaps, glitches and speed bumps being the most precarious and unannounced live work I’ve attempted, I have to consider a range of responses I might receive from the Public.

The key thing is really that the audience can step into the work quite quickly from a visual or sensory perspective. I am not looking to push a particular ideology or message onto the work, or onto the audience. It’s about letting the audience come to the work and then letting them run with the idea. I like there to be elements you can grasp that are just about everyday experiences, how the work highlights their own space, their journeys, and the motions they go through within this familiar but transitional space.

ZK: You recently performed a series of works titled ‘In an Instant' at FOLD gallery which involved you leaving a series of marks on the walls with black lipstick. What is the relationship between the marks, or on other occasion’s objects, you leave behind after your performances? Are they simply a form of documentation of the action that has taken place or do you see them as independent works in their own right?

WM: This is a very interesting point to me right now, as I am trying to find new ways to work through the relationship of live action, documentation and aftermath. When I first started making works that did leave physical marks I just thought about them as traces and residue, but now I think you have to consider them more carefully than that, before they end up being a slightly nostalgic left over object which will label the work in a certain way. I am also trying to consider works to be more of a thought than a concept. It’s also great when a work doesn’t equal itself or complete itself too much.

I feel that in the more recent work I am keeping the residue active beyond a finite mark and I like that even after the event at FOLD, the marks continue to hold a new tension or possible re-action.

Or with Deux Chevaux again when presented at The Ryder, the reigns draped down over the car bonnet onto the floor after the horses have departed signal the potential of the work to become something new or about to happen, the sculpture I think retained this propositional form I’m after. 

As to documentation, I am always recording and gathering sound, notes, and photos of everything I do. Even when I practice an action in the studio I like to consider how it looks from the Other’s perspective, the angles, the speed and balance of the piece. Most of this ends up being a private record for further research. For me documentation isn’t so important for recording something that’s happened but has more significance in enabling something new to take place.

ZK: Your recent piece Soprano for route no.141 included a live musical element as will your forthcoming Sculpture Shock intervention. What is it that appeals to you about using sound and in particular the unaccompanied voice in your work? What do you feel it helps you convey to your audience that actions alone cannot?

WM: With sound like time, it is the fragile and vulnerable qualities that attract me, its immediacy is an exciting prospect that leaves no trail of it’s self, but embodies the presence of memory by inhabiting a space for a moment. Like the smell of a club or music venue the morning after or a gallery the morning after a great opening, sound has this incredibly sensory power you can do so much with. In many ways I also find music more open, more democratic than ‘art’ in the Fine Art sense. So Gaps, glitches and speed bumps will attempt to work off music’s relationship to line drawing.

ZK: How has Sculpture Shock assisted you in the development of your practice and what are your future artistic ambitions?

WM: The assistance and support has come at a crucial time. This year has been quite busy with 2 solos, 5 group shows, and recently being selected for the Jerwood drawing prize. The residency has added a lot to the momentum to my work. The constant activity in and around the studio has been great, conversations, studio visits, photography of studio process, it has felt good to be part of this busy programme.

With the spiralling costs of studio rent and living expenses in London, to know this is supported through the Sculpture Shock award for three months has been a big chance to pursue new work and work towards a large final project in September. It will be hard to get me out of here, I love the studio space, whether the day is going well or not, it feels good every time to be in here.

Written by Zana Kingwill
Interviews April 29, 2019

Lynn Dennison Interviewed - Part 2 / May 5, 2015

ZK: In your Finalist Slam talk in January you stated that your work is particularly informed by Michel Foucault’s theory of Heterotopias as discussed in his 1967 lecture Of Other Spaces (Des espaces autres). Focusing on sites which “have the curious property of being in relation with all other sites, but in such a way as to suspect, neutralize or invert the set of relations that they happen to designate, mirror, or reflect” in Of Other Spaces Foucault describes a heterotopia as ‘a sort of simultaneously mythic and real contestation of the space in which we live’. Can you elaborate on the importance of this theory to your work and how it has shaped your practice?

 LD: Although the different ideas of spaces in Foucaults hypothesis is broad and seems as if it could include many places, I am drawn to his sixth principle; the idea of one space where several others converge, and where the juxtaposition of several supposedly incompatible sites meet in a single real place. It’s this idea of bringing together different worlds that don’t normally co-exist in a single environment and arranging them so it appears as if it could be possible that I really focus on in my work. I like the idea of creating a space which is simultaneously real and unreal. By making installations constructed in man made environments in which I am juxtaposing images of rural spaces, I am hoping to bring into question our relationship with the surrounding world.

ZK: Are there any other philosophical or aesthetic principles you are attracted to such as Robert Smithson’s theory of the non-site?   

LD: Well the idea of nature and culture converging has also been suggested by Bruno Latour, who maintains that modernity creates two separate poles; nature/science and culture/society. In ‘We have never been modern’, (Nous n’avons jamais été modernes) published in 1991 he suggests that, as hybrids such as global warming and deforestation increase, it is no longer possible to keep the idea of nature and culture separate and we need to rethink these distinctions and recognize the relationship between nature and culture. He stated that, ‘The unthinkable non place becomes the point in the Constitution where the work of mediation emerges. It is far from empty: quasi-objects, quasi-subjects, proliferate in it.’ 

You mentioned Robert Smithson, and yes I think there are parallels, especially with his non-site works because like him I am bringing one site into another. There is a certain degree of ambiguity as to where the new site has come from, although it’s suggested it’s never fully disclosed. The journeys he undertook were central to his practice as an artist, and his non-site sculptures often included maps and aerial photos of a particular location, as well as the geological artifacts displaced from those sites. I also consider walking to be a very important part of my process and I use my recordings of this process in my work. We both share an interest in the sublime and the picturesque, and his ideas about Olmsteds Central Park and the layering of history and human intervention in the site is something I have also explored in a recent collaboration in a work about Greenham Common.

ZK: Our relationship with nature, experience of the landscape, and its potential to be a violent and destructive force is at the heart of your practice. What do you hope to inspire in your audience by using this subject matter and what experience do you hope it will provoke?  

LD: My preoccupation with nature’s power to be destructive, and our inability to contain it, stems from my interest in the sublime really and trying to recreate this experience. I am hoping that by bringing landscape into unexpected places, the viewer will look again at their surroundings. There are so many glossy representations of nature that don’t seem to have much to do with the real thing. The idea that nature is just beautiful to look at to me is disregarding its potential for destruction. Even through our efforts to control nature by designating areas of natural beauty and choosing other areas to build over, we are still unable to control, or even predict, the weather. Storms, floods and earthquakes wreak havoc, often with little warning. It is not only this fear of our world becoming a hostile environment that I explore in my work, but also an anxiety that may be closer to home, the struggle to reconcile ourselves with the natural world around us. Kathleen Jamie asks in her book ‘Sightlines’, ‘….what is it that we’re just not seeing?’, suggesting that somehow in our dealings with nature there is a disconnect. By questioning our responses to landscape and creating situations which challenge expectations of the surrounding world, I am trying to discover a connection.

ZK: Water is a repeated theme in your work. Why does it hold such resonance for you?  

LD: I suppose it is the sublime element of a vast and dangerous sea or mass of water that resonates for me, but I am also interested in the romantic ideas surrounding the idea of water and the sea in particular. The idea of a world under the sea has long held a fascination for me, I grew up spending a lot of time by the sea and spent many days in and around the water fantasizing about these things. It still fascinates me that there are underwater towns and cities such as Dunwich in Suffolk. The power of the water to cover our world in that way is both fascinating and frightening. 

I use water as a metaphor for memory and the passing of time, as if things are buried beneath it, but I also use it as a surprise element–cascading down a set of stairs or filling up a building. 

ZK: How has Sculpture Shock assisted you in the development of your practice and what are your future artistic ambitions?

LD: I don’t know what will happen in the future, but I can definitely say how Sculpture Shock has helped me because it has been a fantastic experience. You have given me this commission to make a work in a space which is totally different to any other venue I have worked in before. There have been challenges, but every new building that I work in presents a new set of challenges, and it has been really interesting for me to work out how to use the space. it is a much bigger space than I have worked in before and it’s been a huge learning curve to work in a space that size. It’s also been great to have this studio to work in, a space to try things out and focus completely on the installation.

Written by Zana Kingwill
Interviews April 29, 2019