Some plastic stuff.

Ok, it was really broken, a glitch or something stopped it from lighting up at all, but Zoe Fothergill also questioned the sense of manufacturing fairy lights powered by a solar panel at all. Which is very true, I mean, when are you supposed to use them anyway, on a sunny day on the beach or in the garden? It wasn’t very hard for me to get the lights working again. I just ditched the solar panel which was pointless anyway and got another set of fairy lights (very similar design, probably made in the same city somewhere in China), this time battery powered. A bit of swapping the cables around got me the lights shining. Then blinking, and finally (I had two set of lights now after all) blinking alternatively between two colours. But what was the point of it? What was it I was looking at here? Pausing and considering that for a moment I concluded that more than any other sign or meaning or image, what this object was communicating to me was, -I am made in China. Which I also decided to make it say.

I am what I say I am.

Object no. 51

It is really incredibly light, and not at all that fragile.

This sculpture is the last I finished for the Temporary Art Repair Shop in Edinburgh. Not because it was hard to come up with an idea. It was clear to me immediately when Gordon Munro came in with this little broken RC helicopter what I wanted to do with it. Rather it was getting the right materials, making the mould, letting it set (and air out a bit, since polyester always stinks so terribly for a few days after casting) that took time. It was mainly the dark front cockpit of the toy copter, and how half translucent the body is, that much more suggested an ancient dragonfly than a high tech toy vehicle.

Will people in the future find plastic toys stuck in real amber, or will we have cut down all the trees long before making that impossible?

I was happy that the idea I got for this object can be seen as reflecting on aspects of sculpture, historically and now, as I had several good conversations with Gordon about sculpture and how it is taught and presented. Is Ancient Future a classical or a modernist sculpture, is it a pun or a fake, is it a ready-made or a fiction? I was also happy with how bits of plaster from the mould which got stuck in the polyester resin ended up looking like the chalk deposits you can often find on raw pieces of amber or flint.

A chunk of amber this big would be worth a lot of money, even without a toy helicopter within it.

I wonder how long this piece of fake amber will survive. Polyester resin is itself pretty hard stuff, of course not as hard as stone, but amber itself started as soft resin that slowly petrified during millions of years under the ground. Will the lump I made eventually end up under ground, were it will get further compressed and chemically transformed into some kind of super amber, or will the resin slowly grind down and dissolve into the huge polymer sludge we are leaving for our grandchildren’s generations? Maybe the polymer sludge itself will slowly change and transform over coming millennia, into new layers and deposits of oil and chemicals.

You can just about see what is hiding inside, but you could also easily imagine it being a huge insect.

Object no. 28

The ultimate man toy, or at least one of them…

It’s a bit unfair perhaps, but when I got my hands on Derek Sutherlands old electric guitar, my first thoughts were not all the things I could turn it into, but rather how I could use different parts of the guitar to finish other sculptures I was working on. I ended up using bits of the excellent, dense and very dry wood for the head of sculpture no 11, the legs of no 24, the elephant spider, and for the bridge supporting the single string of Brass band bottle neck, no 46, which also got one of the tuning pegs. The real beneficiary though was no 2, Rejuvenate, the old banjo that got the entire electric innards from the guitar transplanted into it. So, to compensate I of course had to come up with something just as boyishly and rebelliously wild as an Axe.

I never had time to test it, but I hope it shoots straight.

The super light carbon fibre bow is not very strong, but then the Man Toy is not intended for dangerous use. I imagine instead something much more playful, like a Wilhelm Tell style game of shooting cigarettes directly into the mouth of your friends (just remember to wear safety goggles, no really, you should!) The string is one of the original guitar strings, and with the mechanism it’s the same as with all mechanical artworks. You fiddle and fiddle and fiddle, and then when it finally works, you pray that it will continue working for a while. I do have some bad experiences with making sculptures with movable parts, and have promised myself repeatedly not to make any more, but they are so much fun…

I realize that the shape makes this sculpture a bit awkward to hang on the wall, but maybe it could hang from the ceiling?

Object no. 44

Black leather exuding discipline and strictness.

Chris Muirhead admitted that he loathed his wife’s now replaced black leather handbag and boots, which is fair enough, but what I found amusing was his reason for feeling so – that they made her look like a district nurse. I guess it was something with how one ends up carrying a large handbag. But still, it set my imagination in motion. Since Chris is also an artist, I felt I should engage with the material in an interesting way. I approached it by imagining this hypothetical district nurse (I never met Mrs Muirhead so my imaginings were purely based on the donated leather objects themselves), and then I tried to paint a portrait of her using the boots and bag as my material. Both boots and handbag had features I could retain, even though by necessity I had to scale down the figure of the nurse. I cut down and folded the bag around one of its handles, creating a smaller version of the same where some of the forms just became much more prominent. The toes of the boots also got to stay, to keep the shape and function, but I bent the boots around their toes so that they also came down in size.

Always on the run between different patients, but always so elegant.

The rest of the figure was then constructed from the leather I had saved from the boots and the bag, apart from the tights that came from the bags lining. I wanted to keep it simple, so I basically just stapled the leather on a number of plywood cut-outs that I then attached to a backing board. This is also the reason she never got a head, but also that I wanted to let her retain her mystery, and that I preferred to imagine her seen from behind, dashing past with confident steps on her way to the next patient.

A clever owner could still use the bag to hide something, maybe the key to a secret hideaway, or messages…

Object no. 18

What’s left from last years Christmas.

This mix of odd toys and pieces were the remnants of gifts from a devoted grandmother. I was asked if something could be produced to be given back, as a thank you for presents past, and also as a remembrance of all the joy the little one had found in the little toys. Tinkering around with these assorted plastics quickly and inevitably focused on function, and soon a hybrid vehicle had been assembled.

For speedy delivery of sugar cubes.

Propelled by a (maybe not so) strong spring action, this tricycle is intended for passing lighter gifts and solid refreshments, such as sugar cubes or toffees, around the tea table in an enjoyable fashion.We hope it comes into good use.

Object no. 73

The electrician who dismounted this old fuse box took photographs of it, since he had never seen anything this old still in use.

This old cast iron(?!) fuse box had actually been in use in Michael Scott’s house until very recently. He had painted it white himself since his wife hated it, but when the electrician finally swapped it for a newer (and most definitely safer) version, he still felt bad just chucking it away, but luckily enough there was now a refuge in the art repair shop. What struck us about it is probably the same reason why Michael liked it himself, its solid, early industrial and very material construction. The first thing we decided to do, even before the final design came to me, was to strip away all paint and brush it up, to reveal the dull lustre of cast iron again.

Sanding and polishing off paint with a dremel is a lot of work, but in this case really payed off.

It’s a beautiful object in itself, but I still wanted to do something with it. Since the function (it once had) is such an integral part of its design and look, I had to do something playing with the idea of electricity, and I also wanted to include the slight fear and disbelief we generally experience when encountering the attitude of Victorians towards safety (still encountered in many less affluent countries today). The half naked tangle of loose cables was added for this reason, to suggest the possibility of getting electrocuted. None of them are connected to high voltage of course, but two of them are connected – to a battery powered fairy light hidden inside the box. Now, if someone should take it upon them to play with the copper wires and accidentally or on purpose managed to bring the connected ones together, the cold blue light inside the box would briefly spark to life, suggesting a remnant of Victorian electricity still residing in this solid old iron troll.

Fairy light in Iron box.

Object no. 43

When it breaks it breaks in a thousand pieces.

This pretty Japanese vase, from the thirties or forties is my personal guess, completely shattered in an accident involving a cat and a niece in Pat Whitten’s sitting room.Rather than bemoaning it, she took it to the art repair shop, where she suggested maybe I could use it for a mosaic. I agreed, since the pieces all had pretty colors and image fragments, but the problem was that many of the larger pieces were still very curved. It didn’t feel right to smash the porcelain in even smaller bits just to be able to fit them on a flat surface, since I am here to repair and not to break, so I decided to try out a different kind of mosaic.

Three dimensional.

While retaining the original shape of the vase, I added a piece of fictional story, an action, of growing and bursting from the inside instead of being smashed from the outside. We built up an oddly shaped entity inside the vase, which, being unable to contain it, cracked and burst. Is this clumsy ceramic body growing from within the accumulated stress and frustrations of a society outgrowing its traditional image, or is it an attempt by the young niece to fix a broken vase?

If the vase had been part of nature, would it then be a seed capsule cracking open?

What is decorative, the mass produced (but most likely still hand painted) pieces of a porcelain vase or the handmade clay vessel now hiding within it? Maybe the contrast? The vase was pretty, but would probably have been overlooked in a room with other decorative furnishings and details. Now it stands out, but can definitely not be considered pretty. The work put into making a ceramic shell on the inside was very complicated, since clay shrinks when it is fired, demanding of us that we foresee the changes the material goes through during the whole process, but does the hours of careful work and then corrections add up to an increased value or not? For me, this piece is asking a lot of questions relevant to art.

Now it’s signed with more than just “Mada in Japan”.

Maybe what is uncontrollable about the growth, is not that it is breaking out of its confinement, but rather that anytime you embark on a creative project, you allow the entangled variables to become so loose that they might fly off and alter the very premises you are working from.

Object no. 22

Typical institutional curtains, when taken down and thrown in a pile.

Lenka Vojtiskova came in with a bunch of rolled up strip curtains from her work, a care-home for children. She thought it was a shame to throw the long fabric strips away and asked if I could make some kind of wall decoration for her workplace. With such a particular material, that at the same time don’t carry with it many cultural associations (what I mean is that most people wouldn’t even necessarily recognize the strips as curtains if re-used in a different context) I started thinking about the specific ways that long strips of fabric could be used, so in this case functionality took precedence over associations. Since they were white and of suitable proportions, I felt that they would lend themselves well to a kind of moving picture machine or animated painting. Stitching the strips together in hoops, I then constructed a frame with wooden rolls that could support a number of horizontal picture loops.

The function of the artwork is just as visible as the function of the depicted locomotions.

Using open source archives, I then found suitable photographic series from Eadweard Muybridge’s studies of human locomotion. My assistants painted a number of simple monochrome motion series based on Muybridge’s studies that in a clear and playful way illustrate the nature of human movements over time.

The images illustrate motion even when they are not moving.

The rolls supporting the picture loops can be turned by means of two wooden handles on the underside of the frame, but not very fast, and even if they were, turning them doesn’t resemble film or moving images, since the viewer can see the whole series at the same time, slowly sliding to the side as the handles are turned. The filmic moment happens, rather, in the mind of someone looking at the series and following them from start to end in their mind’s eye. Since we are so familiar with film, we can translate a painting like this one into film even without seeing it move. I hope that my artwork both helps illustrate human motion, and film or animation, by showing simplified shapes and fragments of both phenomena and allowing the brain to fill in the rest.

Object no. 17

Have the pants of an artist soaked up anything artistic?

Ric Warren was doing a micro residency at the ESW at the same time as the art repair shop was running. The pants he handed in had been a disappointment, because they had ripped in the crotch not long after he bought them. As a young up-and-coming artist, I am sure he had plenty of similar experiences with people and opportunities he encountered in the art world, as well as good ones of course. But learning the ropes in this strange business, and picking up the scraps of secret and always uncertain knowledge about how things are done, takes time and is sometimes frustrating. At times of trials and tribulations it is always good to have someone to blame, and therefor I decided to turn Ric’s pants into a Muppet curator, to take out his aggressions on when something doesn’t work out, and also to celebrate with when life is great.

Grown-ups prefer to hang their dolls on the wall.

We tried to keep as much as possible of the details and character when transforming the pants, not really adding more than the stuffing (and the thread of course). The similarity between the pants we started out with and the doll we wanted to create allowed us to retain a lot of its feel and look.Within this framework we tried to add some typical styles of a hypothetical curator, making him tall, skinny and bald, and dressed in a relaxed jacket and shirt all in monochrome, all ready to take the stage in some symposium or round table.

It’s crucial that the ripped fabric is still visible.

The Muppet curator was a very nice example of working closely with one of my assistants. What I try to do is delegate as much as possible of the tasks to the person who will actually perform the manual work, but make sure that we share the same creative vision before starting. In this case we talked quite a lot about how the details from the pants could be used in the Muppet, and also about the visual language, the image of the Muppet curator, and finally about the practical solutions for making the doll. During the work itself we talked a bit about problem solving and particular aesthetic choices, but I try to keep a hands-off approach, which I believe brings the best out of people. Delegating a task should really be more like teaching than organizing work, where the best results are achieved as communication around a collaborative task.

Object no. 53

The aesthetics of old-time functionality.

Sometimes the artwork I craft out of an old object is inspired completely by its looks and aesthetics, without really taking into account story and background of owner or object. It all depends on how strong and immediate associations an object gives me, but I guess that especially when I work fast and intuitively, as in the art repair shop, it is hard for me to separate how much of the inspiration comes from seeing an object and how much comes from talking to its owner. In this case I just saw the possibility of another shape and function inside the object presented to me.

There is enough running around in life as it is.

The great fun in immersing yourself in a project like the art repair shop, where you just have to make art out of what you are dealt, is to surprise yourself with ideas that you could never have imagined you would have. If I would try to describe the experience it’s a bit like if the idea was already in the object, and you just pick it open and out it pops. Sometimes these ideas are really silly, and I need to give them further thought before starting work, but sometimes they come out just right and all I have to do is make the artwork. I have the feeling, that the more skills you have acquired in making, and the less you inhibit your immediate mental impulses, the more ready and finished the idea appears. Sometimes, like in the case of the hamster couch, the idea appears to me exactly like it will be, with a clear idea of how and with what materials to make it, title and interpretation.

The only thing missing in the cage is a telly.

Both the strength and the weakness of these collage-like artworks is their reliance on shared cultural signifiers, allowing a crazy associative mind-jump of the artist to be picked up by the audience. That’s why comedy can be so culturally specific and also time bound. The most interesting aspect for me is not necessarily in imagining what a crazy idea an artist had when he made a specific artwork, but how the world implied by such a crazy idea would have to look like, and in extension, what this says about our own world, i.e. installing little wheels in rodent cages so that the rodent can still get the exercise he is stopped from getting by being locked up in a cage in the first place.

Object no. 42