Gorgeous textures of old buoys and floats.

When Susan Colvin came by with a bunch of old fishing floats she had found on the shores of the west coast of Scotland, I knew I was in trouble. The texture and colours of these old cork and steel bits was simply stunning. What to do that doesn’t ruin it? The danger with really beautiful materials however, in my opinion, is that one tends to just want to display them “as is”, without altering them. This can be fine, and surely very attractive, but for me it doesn’t make interesting art. What I always come back to, is that I want art to alter our perspective of the world, make us see things in a new way.

Using the materials to their best potential.

Back to the floats though. For The Temporary Art Repair Shop at least, I try to take the functionality (intended, actual or lacking) of the materials into account when making the piece, so clearly here I would have to work with floatation of some kind. I had all these crazy ideas of upside down sculptures floating just under the surface of the water, held up by the cork, but that would have used the cork only as a support. Finally, when in a Pound Store to pick up extras for some other sculptures, I just happened to see this little rubber duck, and then it all came together.

Three is the magic number.

So, ducks for the high seas it was. With the excellent help from one of the stone carving students at the ESW, I managed to shape the cork into ducks, and the old steel buoy then obviously became a globe. I often find, that once I take the first associative step, the rest just follows automatically. So given that the ducks would be dragging a globe behind them, I obviously named them Santa Maria, Pinta and Santa Clara, and painted a pre Columbus world map on the globe. I think they could be seaworthy, and dropped at the right spot at the right time, the currents should drag them to America, but I’m not sure if whoever found them would appreciate the suggestion of a world without the New World.

Signed and also with the assistants' names.

Object no. 26

Old and battered but still running.

I think Hans Clausen was a wee bit cheeky when he handed in this pretty little toy truck. Apart from the worn out paint it is still in good working order, and I have a feeling he is quite attached to it, but since he wanted to take part in the project he had to find some faults with it. More than the paint job, he also found the lacking safety of the truck a cause for concern. No safety belts etc. OK, so maybe he wasn’t really that bothered about the safety aspect of the toy, but since I had a  bit of a culture chock with the whole health and safety paranoia sweeping Britain since I lived here a few years ago, I decided to make that the theme for this piece.

Nice new paint job, all in Bauhaus style basic colors.

Every time I see a sign telling me not to do something, I can’t help but read it also like telling me to do it. -Don’t cross this line! implies that there should be some pretty good reasons for me wanting to cross it.

Text art with a hand made touch.

Most text art uses a non hand made finish. Maybe because most text based artists don’t really like to use their hands that much. I love to use my hands, and I also often find a place for text on my sculptures, so I solve that with careful thin brush strokes.

What is the cultural significance of a skip hire truck?

So many of the basic objects surrounding us in our everyday are covered with texts warning us for something or telling us what to do. Someone said that the average westerner today produces more text in their lives than the entire world before Christ. I don’t know how true that is, but counting emails and texts it could be I guess. But the texts surrounding us on objects and walls still mostly have two very basic messages – Don’t do that! or Buy that!

Always sign and date. The magic of text on all artworks.

Object no. 27

Dump truck that lost its head.

It is always hard to make art for kids. The kind of interventions I make often rely on a kind of humour, or at least on visual and associative games, that are very grown up. When people come in with their small kids, and hand in broken toys, I stand in the conundrum of either fixing the toy so that the kid likes it, or turning it into a kind of artistic intervention that the parents can appreciate, and other grown ups. What I have been trying to do here, is to fix the toys to the children’s liking, but adding a difference in style or function that wouldn’t be found in other toys. I have been trying to create a subtle and gentle intervention in how toys are usually presented to kids, but with the main goal of keeping it interesting for the kids themselves.

Fit and ready for dumping!

In this case I had to replace the lost cabin, which I did with a bit of nicely varnished hardwood from an electric guitar I had cannibalized. But I also had to add a new dimension or characteristic to the way this toy could be used for play. I made very simple alteration. Taking my que from the function of the dump truck, – to dump, I just boosted its capacity for dumping things. I imagine that what a small boy does with a dump truck is mostly filling it up with stuff, then rolling it a bit before dumping out the contents (a Freudian toy if ever there was one!)

Dumping forcefully!

I spring loaded the bed so that it catapults its load when the head is tilted slightly forward. This adds just a little bit of action and is just a tad too much for a normal toy, still without becoming useless or potentially offensive for the kids or the parents. This is a tricky balance to thread, but I hope I have managed here, maybe erring on the side of boredom rather than subversion.

Spring action visible.

And the obligatory disclaimer. I admit I wouldn’t have added this in another country than the UK (or if I had been in the States of course) but keeping your back clear is such an integrated part of UK culture by now that I can’t sidestep it just because I come from somewhere else. The text is a reminder to the parents that something has been done to the toy, and that they should themselves have a look and a think and decide if it is still a suitable toy, or if it should rather go in a drawer for future collecting.

Object no. 11

A broken cup.

Pottery shards are really extremely interesting objects. Most of human history before writing first appeared is dated and ordered using finds of broken everyday crockery. Fired clay vessels have the combined characteristics of at the one hand being extremely durable to erosion, and on the other hand being brittle and easily breakable. This means that pots and mugs were made in great numbers since they often broke within a few years, and then thrown away in rubbish heaps where they have lasted almost unaltered through the millennia. Very handy for archaeologists.

Very simple abstract sculpture.

Taking this durability into account, I wanted to make a piece that records something for the future. The very simple shapes of the broken shards also inspired me, but of something much bigger. Standing there spread out on a flat surface, they reminded me somehow of icebergs adrift in the ocean. Since these will probably soon be as rare as the Dodo and the Tasmanian Tiger, I figured it worth trying to capture something of the silent grace of these floating giants for our descendants. Since Jana Middleton, who handed it in, is an artist herself, I played with a minimal approach, of just changing the surface texture and then tilting the shards a bit so as to look more adrift, which nonetheless required a substantial amount of work, given how durable and resistant ceramics are.

Object no. 19

Nice? music box...

Kay Sheridan really wasn’t that pleased with the little dinosaur music box that she had bought at Muji’s on her last visit to London. Thinking it was a pop-up toy, the ones you can make stand up or fall over by pressing a button under the box, she hadn’t expected it to play any music at all, and certainly not “Land of hope and glory”. And it has to be admitted, the rendition coming out of the box when the dinosaur was “pulled up with his roots” so to speak, also wasn’t very impressive.

No hope for the dinosaurs.

My response to her music box, since she didn’t like the dinosaur, and really didn’t like the tune either, was to kill them both. Instead of setting off the tune when pulled up from the ground, the dinosaur now fiddles along every time he is raised up in the hangman’s noose. Also, the tune I have damaged as much as I could, while still making sure it’s recognizable. I did this by grinding away some of the pegs in the music box, causing it to loose its notes in a John Cagey kind of way. I kept the sculptural language in tune with the original object since I find mass-produced wooden toys such a funny anachronism – more genuine than plastic, but more simulacrum than home made craft projects. Maybe Muji could also pick up on the design and start producing a hangman’ musical box, I wouldn’t mind. By the way, I really wonder how they select their music, and what “Land of Hope and Glory” has to do with dinosaurs in the first place?

Object no. 15

A nice old chair, but unfortunately beyond repair.

This beautiful old rosewood chair was the first object in Edinburgh that I converted into a sculpture. Ms Mathison, who handed it in, told me that she really liked it, but that unfortunately it was well beyond repair, since woodworm had eaten away most of the wooden frame that holds the seat together. On closer inspection it was revealed that the bits that had been almost completely devoured by the worm, were made from another, much lighter, kind of wood than the rest of the chair. So here I had a chair that was really in excellent condition, apart from the seat, that just had to go. We were joking about how the chair was so pretty you could almost hang it on the wall, but that one really shouldn’t keep things without a use value.

Only the useful get to stay...

I picked up on the idea of finding an excuse for keeping the handsome little chair, and quickly decided for a kind of clothes valet, but here with a feminine angle, and also, since it is a rather small piece, limiting itself to only part of the lady’s garments. Rather obviously though, it is really just a reason to keep a delicate and beloved piece of furniture around, and in a form that takes good advantage of the pieces inherent sculptural qualities, and doesn’t bang the drum too much about what didn’t turn out so well constructed in the original chair.

Object no. 25