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

Potato anyone?

Sculpture tutor Andrea Roe dropped by with a couple of her students from Edinburgh College of Arts to have a look at the repair shop. We talked a bit about how the project worked, and most of the students had naturally also something broken with them. One of the good things about art students is that some of them will of course bring art works of their own which have gotten stuck and can’t be further developed. One such object was the old sponge Fiona Beveridge handed in. Looking back on my notations about the object I see that she has written that the problem with the sponge is that it looks like a potato. I am not so sure if I agree, but maybe the potato essence of the sponge has more to do with a collision of artistic aims, the specific aesthetics of the sponge, and what Fiona expects of herself as an artist.

Try to solve this one.

Responding to the dilemma of endless doubts and hesitations hampering an artist, I asked one of my assistants to quickly turn the sponge into a Rubik’s cube, but one that can never be solved. You can squeeze and turn it for ever, but no matter how much you try, the coloured squares will never line up. It took my assistant about half an hour to finish the sculpture, of a game that can never be solved, made from an artwork in progress halted because of hesitation. I hope Fiona can squeeze it like one of these anti-stress toys the next time she gets stuck in her creative projects.

Sometimes a simple gesture is the best.

Object no. 64

Internet research of the local area.

One of the things Rosemary Fraser brought to the repair shop was a map of the local area, printed out from the Internet on the back of already used A4 papers and stuck together with cello-tape in a kind of grid. She said her husband had printed it out and that they had it on the wall until it started to fall apart, as things like these tend to do. I immediately liked the associations I got from this simple object spanning from our industrial past (the map was from 1870) and connecting with our post industrial and hyper communicative present. If the print-outs on recycled papers weren’t going to withstand the test of time, but instead showed how easily and directly accessible information has become, this was in itself an image of our age. Could I preserve it for the future by translating it into a material more typical of our past?

A lasting form of documentation.

I decided for ceramics, since this is a truly ancient material for recording information which also survives age and erosion better than most materials favoured by mankind. It also lends itself unusually well to map-making, if one wants. There was also something about the sheets of paper coming apart as the cello-tape dried, that reminded me of ceramic tiles. I figured that if I cropped the map a bit at the top it would fit just fine on nine 15x15cm clay tiles.

The texture is very visible up close.

I set about transferring the map, topography included, onto clay slabs. This was a very time consuming task. I made five of the tiles myself, and had four different assistants making one tile each. I was careful to make sure we all worked in the same style, showing the assistants in detail how I sculpted all the different elements of the landscape, not because I thought my way would necessarily be better, but because if we all worked in a similar way I hoped the results would also be similar. To my astonishment it worked so well that the finished tiles were almost inseparable in style.

Since the tiles are monochrome, texture is all.

Just as the paper map once hung on the wall, I imagine that the tiles would also belong on the wall, but maybe integrated with the bathroom tiles or over the kitchen sink. Since the map shows the local area, including the house where Ms Fraser lives, it wouldn’t be wrong if the ceramic map was allowed to become part of that house.

Newhaven harbour, in the old days.

As an additional curiosity, when she saw the tiles, ESW’s director Irene Kernan told me that a medieval pottery had once been located at the site of the new ESW building. I found it comforting that random decisions by visiting artists will always turn up meaningful coincidences that can be included in the stories of artworks to widen the way we read them.

Object no. 7