Looking calm and reasonable.

He doesn’t look like he will be too much of a challenge, but since the legs tend to come off when ridden hard, he is actually rather tricky for a little rider. I wanted to bring that to attention, linking his outward appearance to his actual character. The broken timepiece I gave him for an eye had been handed in by the same owner, and to me it helped reflect the inner life frozen in an instant of madness and rage.

Now would you let your little one take a ride?

Object no. 33 & 36

Steampunk?

I was told the kettle leaks, and that made it all of course, together with the fact that it do look a bit like the turret of a submarine, or another archaic steam vessel. To make it sink I just cut its base off at an angle, producing a very simple illusion. But to add drama I also had to insert a protagonist in the piece. I felt it more powerful if the main character was rendered in his natural scale, which meant it had to be a small critter, with a bit of humour but also sympathy.

He shouldn't have to worry about sinking of course.

Object no. 37

Nifty little gadget

This clever little device had unfortunately stopped working properly. Collapsed together it had…used to be able to hold a candle flame in just the right position until it burned out, but now it all folded in on itself, extinguishing the flame as soon as you lit it. In the shape it reminded me of a Sputnik. Nice old tin can with various useful parts sticking out. I turned it into one, but also added a slowly blinking LED I tore from a pound store gizmo, and a confused Chimp, looking down on Earth below. I imagine the blinking light replacing the single candle, and the Chimp looking at us, replacing us looking out at space.

All the parts that were inside the lantern, now outside the sputnik.

Object no. 29

Too many hard serves.

I knew from Leander’s dad, that he is just in the process of applying to secondary school, which is when your performance in school really starts impacting on your future opportunities. Since the racket he handed in had clearly been handled too roughly, it made me think of the saying work hard – play hard. Leander himself is doing well in school without making too much fuss about it, but nonetheless he aimed for the best possible secondary school.

Still serving hard, but this time the ball suffers instead.

Competitiveness is so ingrained in us all, that we bring it with us also in our leisure activities, always trying to be best and to win. To give this stress some kind of body, I created a ball that has been struck so hard that it has melted into the racket, fusing itself with the net while sweating blood. Badminton is after all, a game where iron hard smashes should be alternated with feather light ripostes.

Stuck in the net.

Object no. 8

Fiona Ní Mhaoilir asked me to improve an artwork of hers, or two to be precise. She told me how she, completely spontaneously, had bought two lottery tickets in a news agents just because everyone else waiting in the line before her had done so. They had been duds of course, and resolved to get some kind of benefit out of them she glued them to canvases and turned them into paintings.

Didn’t win a million and didn’t sell for a million…

So, how do you repair someone else’s artwork? I decided to not continue along her premise, but rather to make it about her premise. Depressingly enough, whenever I meet other artists, the talk soon turns to money. Obviously since non of us has any, and we all try to think of these different schemes for getting money. I think we are acting out of a fallacy. Artists don’t make money because they figure out some clever or special way to make artworks, they make money because their gallerist or art dealer is well connected and knows how to present their work. And what do we artists know about money anyway? So why ask another artist for advice in financial matters? Marcel Mauss famously defined Magic as a social phenomenon that works because, and only if, the whole of the group agreed to act as if magic worked, which by the way also nicely describes money (as pointed out by several clever scholars), and also, in my opinion, to a very high degree the value ascribed to art works. I wanted to tie in to this notion of money as magic, because I think a lot of artists (myself included) easily fall victim to wishful (and even magical) thinking when it comes to financial success.

If I can’t have it…

I can’t bring myself to believe, however, that any kind of rituals or self affirmations can make you rich (as an artist, maybe it works for ad guys and car dealers, where at least there is some money floating around to start with), but maybe, since we are all experts at being poor, our real powers would lie in the ability to spread poverty and failure.

…no one else shall either.

Even if my magic can’t help Fiona become rich and successful, maybe at least it will allow her to share her misfortunes with others, deserving of it or not.

Object no. 30

Rob Ireson dropped by rather late in the show, handing in four objects, probably to up his odds at getting at least one of them turned into a sculpture despite my packed shelves and the short time left. They were all very mundane, which is perfectly al right, but still somewhat inspiring. One of them, a severely broken and battered but also already fixed bicycle rear light, was very ugly as an object but could produce blinking patterns in several beautiful series. The light pattern captivated me and I decided to make it the focus of a piece.

Fallen off the bike one too many times, Rob found it at the side of the road.

Taken on its own the object looks just like so many other cheap plastic consumables around us, but when you forget about the object and focus on the lights so many new possibilities open up. It immediately reminded me of a ship, with its long, slender shape (I am talking here of the pattern of lights), so in a way, the piece was already made.

Click the link below to see the sequence of lights.

Click for movie of distress call

Rob is attending the Art in Public programme at the Ulster University, so we ended up talking about the role of the artist in society, and the precarious position of culture in times of economical downturns. This was also on my mind when I put together this art object for him.

Object no. 26

This old lampshade had been used in an installation in PSsquared, three years ago, to create a living room where an artist hung out for the duration of the show. It was handed in by the gallery, and like most stuff that had spent any time sitting around in their chaotic storage room, it was badly battered and torn.

Scruffy everyday.

When I stripped away the fabric, what remained was an abstract shape of almost mathematical simplicity, but also immediately recognizable as the skeleton of a lampshade. I was thinking about what I could turn it into, and the thought struck me that there is no other object around us based on that very shape. There are loads of shapes and forms like that around us, that for compounded reasons of practicality and habit, stay the same year in and year out. Really, there are loads of possible shapes for a lampshade, and many are indeed used, but this very specific classical lampshade shape has been around for a long time and will surely also remain. Is it our need for familiarity that makes us create consistency in our surroundings? Originally the design was surely a result of practicalities of production combined with peoples aesthetic ideals, but all those values have long since given way to reasons of habit and convention.

The orange glow is only visible in the dark.

I decided to keep the shape, but alter the function. By dressing the lamp in a non transparent medium, completely covering all openings, I sterilized its usefulness, and turned it into a monument of its own shape. The addition of basic shapes both above and below is meant to reinforce this impression. I hope that the choice of material is alien enough, while still retaining a certain closeness to what one would expect, to form a link between old usage and new abstract form. It is instantly recognizable but completely different.

Object no. 5

The material is heavy rubber or Bakelite.

Peter Mutschler, who runs PSsquared, handed in a few objects on the first day, just to get me started before anyone from the general public found us. Since one of the objects, a broken toilet flush tank from when the pipes had frozen the last time, was so obviously a ready-made toilet furniture, given to me by a fellow artist, I just had to make an homage to the Fountain.

Will probably end up in the toilet again.

Apart from the joke of course, I also wanted to take the opportunity to point out a real problem. Most of the heavy day to day lifting in the art world is done by individuals who do all of, or most of, their work for free. The rewards they get is social and artistic, and surely much more gratifying than money. The problem, however, is that our society doesn’t recognize charitable work as worth anything, so when these people grow old they end up on the minimum pension. Even though they spent years and years helping other people realize their dreams, and gave their communities the basic structures necessary for a cultural life, these same communities will do nothing to thank them at the end of their careers. As long as you work charitably in a community, you will be part of this community and feel much more connected than most people just going about their daily chores, since you interact with so many different people in different roles. This changes dramatically the day you retire, especially since the consequence of extreme poverty is not only the lack of stuff and security, but mostly also social isolation. This is not just because of how we morally value poor people, but also because it is almost impossible to move about or do anything in our society without spending money. So, the next time you come to PSsquared, as a visitor or as an artist, make sure to use the toilet, and drop a contribution in the box.

Be sure to ask for it next time you visit PSsquared

Object no. 4

Poppy Lloyd came in fairly early before there was so much to see in the gallery and was very enthusiastic about what I was doing. The two objects she gave me were among the ugliest of my whole collection, but I have the feeling she had picked them out as a sort of challenge. Object no 14 was the outer shell of an electrical fake candle. It was a useless part of what had once been a simulacrum, faking the cosiness of evenings at home with lit candles. I had it sitting for a while, trying to come up with something clever to transform it into, but the more I looked at it the more I had the feeling that there was something sinister about it.

More sinister than funny

Instead of changing it I wanted to show its true nature, display it on a pedestal with all its nastiness exposed. I ended up creating quite an elaborate piece, appropriating the style of Goth artists using dripping, black paint over satanic symbols on an old ceramic lamp stand, almost like a theatre stage to influence peoples view of the lost candle I had started with.

Faux Gothic Heavy Metal art.

To further enhance the eerie feeling of an evil object (like objects could have any morals at all) I mounted an elaborate battery driven mechanism inside the lamp stand, faintly illuminating a glowing red eye down in the centre of it, only visible if one peek deep down into the candle. For me the exaggerated visual language, and the post ironical way I use it, is proof of how much our imagination will help fill in to fool us despite our better knowledge, because despite having created it myself, I still feel a bit weird glimpsing it behind my shoulder when I turn around, or leaving it with the internal red light turned on when I leave for the night.

Object no. 14

Worn three times.

Marta Dworakowska actually liked the sneakers she handed in for remaking, they were cool and chique, but just not comfortable. She had tried wearing them three times before giving up. I wanted to keep what she liked about them, and at the same time address the problem of discomfort. Because of this I didn’t want to turn them into something radically different, but keep the shoeiness of them. Thinking about what would be the most comfortable thing to walk on, it struck me that surely, it had to be another foot, not in the sense of being the softest thing you can walk on, but rather in stimulating the most pleasant sensory input. I went ahead and completely cut of the soles of the sneakers before joining them together with elastic string (for that extra wriggle-room).

Find a friend with the same shoe size.

To use them you first need to find a friend with the same shoe size. Then sit down on a comfortable rug, or the grass, or something, and step into the shoe together. Relax and feel the soles of each others feet, realizing that every slight pressure and movement is felt by both of you, and by a part of your bodies that is almost never treated to a delicate touch. Socks are optional, depending on how well you know each other.

Object no. 19