In October 2002 Anish Kapoor completed his extraordinary sculpture Marsyas for The Unilever Series of commissions in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern, London. A challenging and overwhelming artwork, Marsyas is a vast red PVC membrane stretched between three massive steel rings. The title refers to a satyr in Greek mythology who was flayed alive by the god Apollo. This film follows the making of Marsyas, from the earliest maquettes to the complex installation at Tate. Anish Kapoor comments on each stage of the process, and on the ideas and concerns of his art. Also illustrated are a range of his other sculptures and two recent large-scale works: Sky Mirror in Nottingham and Taratantara, created for the empty shell of Baltic as this new art centre was being built in Gateshead.
In the early 1960s Anthony Caro led a revolution in sculpture in Britain. His abstract steel constructions, often painted in bold colours, forged a new and internationally influential sculptural language. In the years since his fertile and diverse practice has consistently challenged and extended what sculpture is, and what it might be. At the age of 80, Anthony Caro remains intensely active, working each day in his studio and overseeing every detail of an extensive retrospective at Tate. Preparations for the show are featured in this profile, along with many of his major works, filmed in Britain, Germany and the United States. In interview Anthony Caro speaks about the development of his art from the bronze figures of the 1950s through the many variations of his work with metals, his hybrids of sculpture and architecture, and his recent large-scale, multi-part responses to Old Master painting and the worlds of myth and Christianity. The film is a portrait of an artist of great distinction whose inventiveness and creative vigour are undiminished.
An internationally acclaimed artist, Antony Gormley is best known for his monumental sculpture Angel of the North. This earth-bound figure with its massive wings shares with all of Gormley's work a preoccupation both with the human form and with our shared spiritual potential. Antony Gormley's early lead and iron figures were cast from his own body. They demand a physical and emotional response, but they also raise profound philosophical questions about memory, the mind and our senses. Some of his sculptures, such as the tiny sleeping figure modelled on his infant daughter Still IV, are intensely private. Other works, like Field and Allotment II, are sweeping social and architectural explorations on a grand scale. Many of Antony Gormley's most significant works are illustrated in this film profile, including Bed, made from hundreds of loaves of sliced white bread, and the spectacular Quantum Cloud created alongside the Millennium Dome in London. Antony Gormley offers a reflective commentary on these and other works and on the central investigations and imperatives of his art.
In 2003 Chris Ofili created the spectacular installation within reach for the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Combining a cycle of paintings depicting lovers in a Paradise-like garden with a shimmering glass dome, Ofili plunged visitors into disorienting spaces of dense colour and enveloping light. Shot in London, Germany and Venice, this film relates the creation of Within Reach. Chris Ofili's reflections on the process are complemented by interviews with his collaborator in Venice, architect David Adjaye, and the structural engineer from Arup Associates, who helped realise the complex dome. Also included is an exploration of The Upper Room, an installation of 13 exquisite canvases by Ofili, which was first shown in 2002. Both this and Within Reach are about "trying to create an atmosphere for people to feel somehow out of themselves." His aim, the artist explains, is to "do something that is sincerely interesting and can honestly enhance the experience of looking."
David Batchelor’s art is about colour. With lightboxes and everyday plastics, eccentric chandeliers and projections, he brings pure, direct colour into galleries and public spaces. His works are immediately delightful, but they are also concerned with what colour means in today’s world and with how we experience it. David Batchelor’s art is also about the city. His colours are the bright, sharp hues of neon and artificial materials, not the soft tones of the natural world. In this profile, the artist is interviewed in his studio, the place where he explores and experiments with “the stuff of the world”. He speaks about many key works and reflects on his distinctive public commissions, including a tower of colour for the Whitehall offices of the Treasury and an illuminated tree by the Thames. Like the best art, these are intellectual works, thoughtful and rigorous, but they are fun too, pleasurable and beautiful.
At the heart of Dryden Goodwin’s art is a fascination with drawing. But the ways in which he explores this age-old practice are anything but traditional. He combines drawing with photography, film and large-scale screen-based installations. He is engaged with time as well as line, and with the sculptural potential of two-dimensional images. Other concerns in his art are also strongly contemporary: the city, ideas of public and private, voyeurism, desire and emotional distance. Many of Dryden Goodwin’s key works are featured in this profile, including his early animations like Heathrow (1994) and the three-screen installation Closer (2002) which features covert video footage of strangers in the city whose features the artist is tracing with a laser pen. He discusses the ambitious eight-screen Dilate (2003) and his most recent film Flight (2006), which is presented in a gallery alongside a display of the thousands of drawings that he made for its production.
Gary Hume makes beautiful paintings. His materials are household paints on aluminium surfaces and his subject's, he says, are "flora, fauna and portraits". The results are elegant, delicate, simple yet elusive and exquisite. Playing gloriously with colour and light, they are paintings of subtle tones, idiosyncratic clashes and insistent reflections. Interviewed in his studio, Gary Hume reflects on his work from the 1980s, when his Doors series won instant acclaim, to his latest creations. As so often, his new work balances recognisable images with abstraction. His people, like Kate (1996) and Michael (2001), are contemporary icons conjured up from bold shapes and strong planes of colour. Illustrated in this profile are many of Gary Hume's most notable paintings, specially filmed in exhibitions in London and Dublin, and in a major 2004 show in Bregenz, Austria. Also featured are the artist's rarely-seen drawings and, in contrasting settings, his deadpan sculpture Snowman.
Gilbert Prousch met George Passmore at St Martin's School of Art in 1967. Since then they have famously lived and worked together as Gilbert & George, creating an extraordinary body of provocative artworks. They have exhibited themselves as "Living Sculptures", documented the banality of their daily lives in London's East End, and, since the late 1970s, produced vibrant, challenging photographic collages. This video profile of Gilbert & George features a characteristically deadpan performance of themselves. Sex, money, race and religion, they explain, are four themes at the heart of their art. Their interview is complemented by images of many of their works, including the remarkable Dirty Words Pictures made in 1977, together with important collages of the 1980s and 1990s. Asked if their work, and their personas, are ironic, Gilbert says, " We always think it's struggle enough to drag something out from inside of ourselves onto that wall without trying to be strange or odd about it. We wanted to be absolutely painful truth," George adds. "I really believe it has to be painful."
Ben Langlands and Nikki Bell, who were nominated for the Turner Prize in 2004, have worked together since 1978. Their precise, formally beautiful art explores the networks of today’s global society within a rigorous conceptual and aesthetic framework. They employ a wide range of media, including models displayed as sculpture, wall paintings, furniture and film. Through this diverse output runs a consistent engagement with ideas of space and place, with architecture and identity, with language and with the hidden connections of international politics. In the interview for this film, the artists reflect on their experiences travelling to the warzone of Afghanistan, where they made the controversial film Zardad’s Dog and researched the digital animation The House of Osama Bin Laden. Other recent works have used the technologies of immersive games and presented the signs and symbols of contemporary networks. Alongside this exploration of virtual worlds, they have also created real-world urban architecture, most notably the spectacular Paddington Basin Bridge in London.
For his show as Britain's representative at the 2001 Venice Biennale, Mark Wallinger brought together a typically eclectic group of sculptures, videos and installations. Like Ecce Homo, his much-loved life-size statue of Christ created for Trafalgar Square, the exhibition provoked and challenged and moved many of those who experienced it. Mark Wallinger's art is often witty and immediately accessible yet at the same time it engages with some of the traditional grand themes, including religion, spirituality and death. His recent works include the ambitious environment Prometheus, centred around a wall-mounted electric chair, and Threshold to the Kingdom which counterpoints the arrival of passengers at an international airport (and perhaps also in Heaven) with Allegri's beautiful music for the Miserere. In this film profile Wallinger considers the meanings and motivations of his art. He also reflects on his earlier explorations of class and identity, most especially in the series of paintings, photographs and videos about the world of racing which culminated in him owning and running the horse A Real Work of Art.
Michael Landy acknowledges that he will probably always be known as "that bloke who destroyed all his belongings". In his 2001 artwork Break Down he publicly and systematically shredded, dismantled and demolished everything that he owned. “I’m always trying to get rid of myself," he says, "so that I can move on. And then I end up always coming back to the same themes… I guess I’m a creature of habit." In this film profile Michael Landy reflects on Break Down and on his other complex and ambitious projects, Scrapheap Services (1996) and Semi-detached (2004). Prompted by his father’s injury from an industrial accident, /Semi-detached/ involved the construction inside Tate Britain of a full-scale replica of the exterior of his parents’ suburban home. He also discusses his meticulous, delicate drawings as well as the ideas and directly personal concerns that underpin his unconventional art.
The artist Mona Hatoum came to London from Lebanon in 1975. Working initially with performance and video, and in the 1990s with sculpture and installations, she has exhibited widely around the world. In the summer of 2000 Mona Hatoum presented three major new works which marked the inauguration of Tate Britain, London. These works, exhibited under the title The Entire World as a Foreign Land, developed Hatoum's interest in the relationship between individual identity and the notion of a broader cultural and geographic identity, or sense of 'belonging'. In this interview, illustrated with these works and with other key installations including Socle du Monde and Corps étranger, Mona Hatoum explores the diverse sources of her work and her engagement with a wide range of often surprising materials. The artist talks vividly about the centrality of the body to her installations, and the ways in which her work employs changes of scale, intimations of restriction and constraint, and contradictory ideas of attraction and repulsion.
Although at times obscured by the artist's celebrity, the art of Tracey Emin is serious and focussed, challenging and at times startlingly beautiful. In this film, she speaks frankly about her career, the craft of her immensely varied work, and the immediate, personal themes with which she engages: autobiography, memory, desire, and identity. Many of her best-known works, including Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995 (1995) and My Bed (1998), are illustrated and discussed, as is a wide selection of drawings, prints, paintings, neons, appliqué blankets and installations. "I always say if I didn’t make art, I’d probably be dead," she reflects. "But let’s be more realistic about that. If I didn’t make art and I’d done well in life, then I might have gone into retail. I would probably be the person in the shop that would be always organising the displays, and always making the noticeboard look nice in the canteen, stuff like that. I’m a genuinely creative person." Please note that this video contains explicit images and adult language featured in artworks by Tracey Emin.
Gillian Ayres studied at Camberwell School of Art from 1946-50, before running the AIA Gallery with painter Henry Mundy whom she married. As a young artist in the 1950's, Ayres was closely involved with leading British abstract artists including Roger Hilton. Ayres was quick to respond to European tachism and American abstract expressionism, creating a body of work that placed her in the forefront of her generation. In the sixties she was the only woman artist to be represented in the important 'Situation' exhibitions, showing large paintings combining oil and paint that aimed for the sublime using very radial drip and pour techniques of action painting. Gillian Ayres defined her career by ranges of style and manner. In the sixties she created glamorous and decorative images in keeping with the hedonistic mood of that time. In the seventies Hans Hofmann inspired Ayres and returned back to an extreme and painterly extraction. Later in that decade Ayres moved back to oil painting and went on to develop her exclusive colourful style and has made an impressive mark on British art.
Howard Hodgkin is one of the world's leading painters, whose art is admired both by critics and by a wide public. Beginning with a remembered experience, Hodgkin works on his seductive and complex paintings for long periods, characteristically producing richly coloured, sweeping compositions, which continue into the picture-frame itself. These paintings uniquely straddle representation and abstraction, at the same time as they demonstrate both an awareness of history and an understanding of art's potential today. Most recently, his interest in working in different scales, evident particularly in significantly larger paintings such as Americana and After Vuillard, demonstrates his concern to engage the viewer in new and challenging ways. In this interview, illustrated with many key paintings, Howard Hodgkin speaks with warmth and passion about how his methods, about his influences, about colour and composition, and about the fundamental importance of painting. "You need things to look at," he says simply, "things to affect your feelings, and your intelligence, and your heart."
Karl Weschke's impressive, complex paintings picture the human figure and the landscape, the everyday and the mythical. His subjects include dogs and drowned bodies, creatures from legends and, increasingly in recent years, the monumental ruins of ancient Egypt. For more than fifty years, he has explored the possibilities of painting and its relevance to an uncertain world. Produced alongside a retrospective at Tate St Ives, with additional paintings from British collections, this film profiles the artist in the Cornwall that has been his home since 1955. Filmed in and around his studio and in the coastal landscape that informs all of his work, Weschke speaks engagingly about his rich, remarkable life and about many of his most significant canvases. Like his work, the painter is serious, intense, spare - and yet also with an appealing streak of mischief.
Martin Creed is one of Britain's most engaging contemporary artists. His self-effacing work reflects an anxiety to communicate in a world already full of too many things. So he frequently tries to produce both something and nothing, and does so in idiosyncratic ways with the modest means from everyday life. In 2000 his MARTINCREEDWORKS solo exhibition was organised by Southampton City Art Gallery. The show provided the first opportunity to reflect on a wide range of Creed's creations, produced over a decade, including sculpture, installations, interventions, statements and also musical compositions performed with his band owada. Much of this work is illustrated here. Martin Creed discusses his uncertainties about making new works and his reluctance to name what he does as 'art'. He also illustrated how simple, ordinary objects, seen in new ways, can suggest often complex and contradictory meanings. Such objects, and the ideas and questions that they provoke, surprise and delight audiences whose individual experiences of the works will often be strikingly different.
Three spectacular canvases by Sandra Blow were one of the highlights of the 2006 Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. Sadly, this was her last show, as she died in August that year. This film was made in her studio in St. Ives as she was preparing to submit her works, and it captures her remarkable character and her fascinating reflections on a lifetime creating beautiful, rigorous, distinctive and joyous paintings. Sandra Blow spent a formative year as a student in Italy in the late 1940s, and she returned to London to begin a distinguished career dedicated to developing her vigorous abstract art. In addition to paint, she worked with a diverse range of materials, including sacking, plaster and coloured paper collages, and while her work often referred to landscape and to architecture, it was always exploring ideas of pure form and colour, balance and chance, light and movement.
Marc Quinn remains best known for his sculptures cast from parts of his body. The first of these, Self (initially cast in 1991), was created with nine pints of his frozen blood. Yet, as this profile demonstrates, his art over the past decade has embraced an exciting and diverse range of materials, including lead, ice, wax, glass, frozen flowers and even DNA.
Stuart Brisley is perhaps best-known for his disturbing physical performances which pushed his body to extremes. But his work as an artist over four decades has embraced sculpture and installation, films and fictions, large-scale participatory projects and, most recently, the Web. Illustrated with archive footage and photographs, this profile of the artist explores his understandings of collaboration and community, of politics and the market, of humour and failure. At the centre of his diverse work are the essential qualities of what it means to be human. Brisley’s art remains challenging and provocative, not least in the recent project in which he has orchestrated works centred on a Museum of Ordure. The museum has a curator and a collector, and, at least as it was shown at the Freud Museum, London, an apparent display of human excrement.
In 1973 Michael Craig-Martin exhibited a glass of water on a shelf, together with a printed text, and called the work An Oak Tree. As the text explained, the artist had changed the glass of water into an oak tree. More than thirty years later, Craig-Martin creates – along with screen-savers, works on LCD monitors and conventional paintings – gloriously colourful environments with blown-up outline images of domestic objects. The conceptual and the rigorously material have been central to the artist’s complex development across four decades of work that is both intellectually demanding and austerely beautiful. At the same time Craig-Martin achieved an almost legendary status as a teacher at Goldsmiths, where he encouraged, among many others, Damien Hirst and Sarah Lucas. Richly illustrated with works and environments filmed in Bregenz and Dublin, as well as at notable exhibitions in England, this film profile outlines the career of one of today’s most innovative and influential artists.
Gavin Turk is a leading figure in British contemporary art. His 1991 degree show work Cave, a blue ceramic plaque commemorating his occupancy of a studio, and Pop, the waxwork figure of himself as Sid Vicious, are among the iconic artworks of the 1990s. His "self-portrait" signatures and his finely crafted sculptures of everyday objects (such as cardboard boxes cast in bronze) bring the commonplace into an art space and challenge the viewer to engage in new ways.
Malcolm Morley is one of the most significant and influential painters working today. Born in England but active in the United States since the late 1950s, Morley has developed an intensely individual vision embracing, but never determined by, autobiography, politics, psychoanalysis, myth, the visual culture of his time and the limitless potential of paint. Filmed as Morley works in his distinctive manner on a spectacular new canvas, this documentary features the artist's provocative reflections on his life, painting technique, influences and concerns. It also illustrates a wide range of his paintings from the earliest abstract works, through the painstakingly precise depictions of reproductions (on postcards, from travel brochures) of ships, contemporary scenes and Old Masters, to the catastrophe pictures of the 1970s. Paintings engaging with ancient cultures followed, and then works based on the cardboard cut-out aeroplane and boat kits which Morley has made since his youth. Most recently, he has returned to paintings of news photographs, exploring a striking and challenging new range of imagery.
This program looks at the distinctive work of the artist and portraitist Julian Opie, who is known for his use of deceptively simple and visually striking designs across a variety of different mediums
Lisa Milroy’s paintings are pleasurable and provocative, clear but complex, immediate and yet richly subtle. In 2001 many of her major works were brought together for an important exhibition at Tate Liverpool; this film, the first about her work, was made alongside that show. Her earliest works are depictions of everyday objects: shoes in serried ranks, collections of lightbulbs and household hardware. Later canvases explore the process of depicting images of people, blank facades of buildings, clichés of photographic landscapes. More recent work is looser and less apparently realist. Speaking about the development of her art from the early 1980s onwards, Lisa Milroy discusses how she uses the sensual and descriptive power of paint to express her unique ways of looking at the world. She reflects on the changes in her work; on the impact of Japan and its culture; on photography and time; and on the craft and process of painting.
Since the 1960s, when he was associated with British Pop Art, Joe Tilson has enjoyed international acclaim for the individuality and originality of his paintings, constructions, prints and multiples. All of his playful, engaging work is informed with ideas from literature, philosophy, ethnography and alchemy. Tilson's early work focussed on mass-market consumerism and politics. But he was soon disenchanted with mechanical methods of production and his art in the 1970s and 1980s employed hand-worked wood and metal in intriguing ways. Shot in and around the artist's studio in Cortona, Italy, this film was produced alongside Joe Tilson's first British retrospective at London's Royal Academy of Arts. He speaks engagingly about his career, his craft and many of his key works, including his most recent paintings. Inspired by the landscape surrounding his home in the Tuscan hills, these works use striking and vibrant colours in conjunction with text, and explore the enduring themes of sex, birth and death.
In a distinguished career since the mid-1970s, Tony Cragg has produced a strikingly diverse range of sculptures in the widest variety of materials. His prolific output embraces organic and industrial creations, abstract and near-figurative images, delicate, powerful, immediate and yet elusive forms. The sculptor, he says, “looks for all the forms that don’t exist.” Filmed in the UK and Germany, where Tony Cragg has lived since the early 1980s, this profile features works produced over the past twenty-five years for both gallery and public contexts. In interview, Cragg discusses his working methods, his fascination with different materials and his fundamental commitment to sculpture as an artform. He speaks of his passion for the significance of sculpture, for its oddities, its quirkiness and its potential discoveries in today’s overwhelmingly utilitarian world.
Science and Surrealism, ancient myths, Buddhism and feminism are among the frameworks of ideas important to Liliane Lijn’s art. In Paris at the end of the 1950s, in Greece and New York, and in England since 1966, she has worked with light, energy and movement, with archetypal shapes and unconventional materials to produce an art that is clear, complex and strikingly beautiful. Many of Liliane Lijn’s key drawings and sculptures are featured in this profile, which was filmed alongside an important reassessment of her work at the Mead Gallery. The Poem Machines and Koans of the 1960s and 1970s are considered as well as the ambitious “goddess” figures of more recent years. Liliane Lijn speaks passionately about the art she has made across four decades and that she continues, with great energy, to create today.
Boyle Family have worked together for more than 30 years producing an art that scrutinises and replicates fragments of reality. Mark Boyle and Joan Hills began making assemblages in the early 1960s. In 1964 they started their life-long project Journey to the Surface of the Earth, recreating randomly-selected parts of the world’s cityscapes and landscapes. This unique practice continued as Mark and Joan’s children Sebastian and Georgia increasingly worked with them. But Boyle Family’s art has also embraced performance, projections and light-shows, data collection and micro-photography. The aim is to embrace all aspects of an ever-changing world and to make us look, hard and long, at this world’s endlessly fascinating details. Works by Boyle Family were filmed for this profile at their 2003 retrospective at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh. The interview was shot in early 2005 a few weeks before Mark Boyle died from a heart attack.
From previously barren moorland in the Pentland Hills near Edinburgh, Ian Hamilton Finlay has created a unique garden as an encompassing work of art. Little Sparta is a magical combination of culture and horticulture, poetry and planting, philosophy and myth. Ian Hamilton Finlay began his work at Little Sparta in the mid-1960s. With friends and collaborators, around a group of old farm buildings he has fashioned landscapes, streams, bridges, glades, lanes, bowers and more. Everywhere there are inscriptions and sculptures reflecting the artist’s preoccupations: the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, pre-Socratic philosophy, garden history, World War Two, the sea and fishing fleets, time and mortality. Ian Hamilton Finlay chooses now not to speak about his work in detail. Made to celebrate the artist’s 80th birthday in 2005, this film offers only a spare narration to complement a lushly visual showcase of the beauties, provocations and puzzles of Little Sparta.
Yinka Shonibare is a painter, photographer and installation artist, whose art is influenced by both the cultures of Nigeria, where he grew up, and Britain, where he studied and now lives. He has exhibited widely all over the world, and this film profile includes exhibitions filmed in London, Rotterdam and Stockholm. His paintings and his sculptural installations make extensive use of dyed fabrics, which became popular in West Africa after independence. But many of these textiles betray Indonesian influences, are manufactured in Holland and are purchased by the artist in Brixton in south London. The complexities of nationality and identity, of history and ethnicity, post-colonialism and today’s global economy, form the intellectual and aesthetic arena in which Shonibare works His works have a strongly contemporary feel, but at the same time they engage with the traditions and masterworks of western art history. The results are witty and playful, sensuous and poetic.
Vong Phaophanit showed his strikingly seductive Neon Rice Field when he was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1993. Like much of his rich and complex work since then, this installation exhibits a strong interest in language and light, in the painterly qualities of ephemeral materials and in ideas of cultural displacement. He was born in Laos, educated in France and has worked mostly in Britain since the early 1990s. Much of his work now is commissioned for architectural and environmental settings, including Outhouse in Liverpool. Created like many of his large-scale sculptures with fellow artist Claire Oboussier, this is a transparent glass house (with opaque windows) which serves as a flexible social space for the people who live in the surrounding tower blocks. In this profile, the artist reflects on his public work and his more private “studio” art, including his engaging series of perforated objects. He also discusses his most recent project, Life Lines, produced with Claire Oboussier in 2006 for Southend-on-Sea. Using cutting-edge electronic technology, Life Lines is an interactive light sculpture that responds to movement, sound, air pressure, humidity, light and wind, to reflect its ever-changing coastal environment.
Ian Davenport’s 48 metre-long painting Poured Lines transforms the tunnel beneath a railway bridge in Southwark, close to Tate Modern. The painting’s numerous vitreous enamel panels were created in a German factory where they were baked at fearsomely high temperatures. This film follows the artist as he creates this remarkable public artwork. Like all of Ian Davenport’s work, Poured Lines rigorously explores the qualities and possibilities of paint but is at the same time a joyful and exuberant composition. It also responds to the city around it, enhancing the colours and movements of a busy road. Ian Davenport showed in the near-legendary “Freeze” exhibition, organised by Damien Hirst, in 1988 and he was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1991. But as his paintings have evolved over two decades, his central concerns of colour and abstraction, experiment and the everyday, have remained strikingly consistent. Poured Lines exemplifies the simple delight of his very best work.
Artists Dalziel + Scullion have worked together since 1993, based in the remote north east of Scotland. Using photography, video, sculpture, sound and installation, they have created a collection of work that is recognised for its distinctive vision and sensitivity to its context and the environment. They are well known for their site-specific works, which include important public commissions, such as Horn, the giant stainless steel sculpture sited on the M8 motorway, which intermittently broadcasts poetry, music and voices at passing cars. They reflect on how these works illustrate the contradiction between the strange hybrid of wilderness and the high-tech, man-made industrial installations found in the remote landscapes of Scotland. The point at which nature and culture intersect is a continuing theme throughout their work, despite a more recent shift in geographical focus. In this video profile, Dalziel + Scullion discuss their continuing fascination with timescales and how their work attempts to reflect on the vast gap that exists between the limits of human history and the incomprehensible span of geological processes and creation. Home, the artists’ first solo exhibition at The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh in 2001, comprises an important body of new work, set against the backdrop of the magnificent glacial landscapes of northern Scandinavia. Their art reflects on the primary themes of landscape, evolution, religion and time, and represents a rediscovery of landscape as a means of reflecting on fundamental ideas about the world we live in today.
Gereon Krebber’s proposal for a monumental and expensive aluminium object called Tin won the 2003 Jerwood Sculpture Prize. Shot over more than a year, this film follows the creation, casting and placing of the final sculpture. Sitting in the elegant country house garden at Ragley Hall, Tin suggests a kitchen container or a hamburger and yet is at the same time defiantly abstract. Krebber is a young sculptor from Germany who studied at the Royal College of Art and now works in London. The surprising range of his work, and the processes which create it, are revealed here as he talks engagingly about how to create “seriously flippant” objects. His art, made with diverse materials including balloons and Cling Film as well as traditional media, has a unique deadpan humour. Its effect, the artist hopes, is to make you ”smile and shiver at the same time”. theEYE: Gereon Krebber is an Illuminations production in association with the Jerwood Charitable Foundation.
Richard Wilson is an internationally renowned sculptor and installation artist who often works on an architectural scale. 20:50, his room-sized sea of reflective sump oil, is an overwhelming experience. More recent works like Jamming Gears, made for London’s Serpentine Gallery, and Over Easy, built into The Arc arts centre in Stockton-in-Tees, offer resonant and profound challenges to our sense of space and of the environment around us. By turns amusing and disturbing, Wilson’s creations are about upsetting our preconceptions of who we are and what kind of world we live in. In this profile, Wilson outlines the genesis and meanings of a selection of key works, including Slice of Reality, a 20-metre-high cross-section of 600-ton dredger set in the Thames riverbed near the Millennium Dome. Like this monument to Britain’s shipping industry, many of Wilson’s works are created for specific places, and he reflects here on this, on the importance of collaboration and on his spectacular performances throughout the 1980s with Paul Burwell and Anne Bean in the Bow Gamelan Ensemble.
Graham Gussin creates art in an almost bewildering variety of media: film, sound, installation, events, photography, text, painting and more. The key early work Savannah (1990) features a wooden plaque and a wall light, while the production of the ambitious film projection Remote Viewer (2002) involved a trip to Iceland and the services of someone with telepathic ability. Underpinning all of his subtle, witty, often disarmingly beautiful work is a number of consistent concerns and influences: landscape and the notion of the sublime, science fiction cinema and Romanticism, place and movement. Made alongside the most comprehensive exhibition of Graham Gussin’s work to date, at Birmingham’s Ikon Gallery in 2002, this video profile showcases many of the artist’s works, including films and projections such as Beyond the Infinite (1994) and Spill (2000) which plays so productively with time, space and perception.
Hamish Fulton describes himself as a “walking artist”. For more than thirty years he has undertaken demanding walks in many parts of the world, and drawn on his experiences to create distinctive artworks using text, graphics and photographs. He aims to “leave no trace” in the landscape, and he acknowledges that his art cannot represent the experience of a walk. “What I’m interested in,” he explains, “is presenting a sort of skeleton of something, and then the viewer fills in what’s missing, maybe from your own experience.” Although they exhibit a striking consistency in their concerns, Hamish Fulton’s artworks can exist as large-scale wall paintings and as modest publications, as graphics to compete with advertising hoardings and as online animations. They are informed both by spiritual ideas and by political questions prompted by our uses of the environment and by specific issues such as land rights. Made alongside Hamish Fulton’s large-scale 2002 exhibition at Tate Britain, this profile features both an extensive range of the artist’s work made since 1971 and an engaging interview in which he outlines his ideas.
Regularly using subjects which lie on the border of science and philosophy, Conrad Shawcross‘s structural and often mechanical sculptures question empirical, ontological and philosophical systems ubiquitous within our lives. While at first appearing rational and functional, his complex mechanised systems in the end deny all rational function and so the viewer is forced down philosophical and metaphysical avenues to deduce a ‘rasion d’etre’. From early works such as The Nervous System, 2002 – a monumental spinning machine that endlessly weaves a length of coloured rope into the form of a double helix, the shape of DNA – to his recent giant spiral work Continuum, 2004, the artist has attempted to visualize, among other things, the incomprehensible of human concerns, time.
Tony Hill‘s films present entirely new ways of looking at the world in which we live. His extraordinary sculptural films turn and transform, squeeze and stretch the landscape and constantly challenge how we see what’s around us. They are films about perception, time and space but they are also films about the body and memory and being alive. Above all, they are constantly surprising and delightful and, often, funny. Many of the films have been created with specifically built camera rigs, and a selection of these is demonstrated in this richly illustrated interview with the artist. Among the works that Tony Hill discusses are Downside Up (1984) with its constantly orbiting viewpoint; Water Work (1987), which was shot on and just below the surface of a swimming pool; the sensual film Laws of Nature (1997); and the artist’s idiosyncratic portrait of Darlington Hall Estate in Devon, Camera Obscura (2000).