My practice consists of sculptures and installations. A recurring theme is an attention to detail in the everyday object, action or experience.
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Can we begin by talking about your decision to relocate and what the relationship might be between that and your practice?
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Stuart Mayes’ body of sculptural works has grown out of his long-term performance-art practice.
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London-based conceptual artist Stuart Mayes makes good use of the stuff most of us take for granted.
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My practice consists of sculptures and installations. A recurring theme is an attention to detail in the everyday object, action or experience. I usually work on series of sculptures and installations concurrently.
The works' raw materials are a mix of new and secondhand objects. These objects might be found in flea markets and charity shops, or simply bought in stores and on-line. I am drawn to anonymous objects, that is, objects without a known history. This kind of object not only stands for itself, it also stands for similar objects elsewhere. It is intended that these familiar anonymous objects encourage the viewer to reflect on their own experience of similar things.
Recent sculptural work features domestic crockery and baking tins. Previous pieces featured men’s shirts and handkerchiefs. Collections of objects are selected for their particular social and cultural significance as well as their visual appeal, for example it is important that the secondhand-shirts are business shirts. The materials are treated with processes that are more often associated with domestic craft than fine art.
The installations take familiar objects and shift how, or where, they function. Often simple technology or the participation/activation of the viewer is part of the work. The pieces combine personal research with responses to the particular location. The architecture and history of the site plays a significant role in developing the work. Some installations have a live element where the on-site production is part of the piece. Other pieces are designed to change or evolve over the period of installation, for example outdoor chalk drawings. Installations have been made for a decommissioned train station, a garden shed, a gallery window, and a former factory and warehouse.
My work addresses how mass produced mundane objects acquire personal significance. This might be through applying a labour intensive process such as patchwork and hand polishing, or alternatively through conceptual associations. The work is often made from materials with one or two colours from a palette of white, black, shades of blue and grey, silver and gold. I write detailed descriptions of the materials in each piece as this information forms part of the work. The titles indicate some of my intentions and I enjoy a vocabulary that can be read as both bawdy and academic.
Email conversation between Andrew Bryant and Stuart Mayes, August 2010.
Your blog ‘Project Me’ focuses to an extent on your move from London to Stockholm. Can we begin by talking about your decision to relocate and what the relationship might be between that and your practice?
I believe that moving to Stockholm will enable my practice to develop and mature in a way that it could not in London (at least not with the resources I have available to me here in London). From the quality of studio that I can afford to the acceptance of older (unknown) artists, Stockholm offers a broader range of opportunities.
The decision to relocate crystallised during my residency at WIP:Sthlm (2009). This was an incredibly productive and instructive time. I found that I was working in a more intuitive way than I had for many years and this is certainly something I want to pursue. I got to know some artists, curators and galleries in Stockholm and was impressed with what I saw. I realised that I felt very comfortable there.
The scale of the city and the art-scene suits me; it is big enough to be interesting and small enough to be friendly. The residency gave me a framework to explore the possibility of not being in London. As I think I mentioned in my blog, I don’t think I have what it takes to be a London artist, I didn’t want to admit this before. I want to maintain a relationship with London but I want to do it from elsewhere.
Perhaps relocating also offers me the chance to ‘re-focus’ (rather than ‘re-invent’) myself. I want to shift my practice, and I feel that relocating provides a natural opportunity to do this. I’m very excited to see how it works out!
I am interested in teasing out this notion of working ‘intuitively’ and why we feel we aren’t permitted to do it. I come into contact with a lot of international artists and it does seem to be particularly taboo in the UK. Do you have any thoughts on why that might be?
I think that in the UK we’re not encouraged to acknowledge that we work intuitively. In London I often notice that when artists speak about what they’re doing they describe their activities as ‘projects’ or ‘research’ (sometimes even ‘research projects’!). These terms are mainly used by artists whose practice is academic or in some way publicly funded or supported, and because I aspired to be this kind of artist I adopted this language too. I let the language affect my practice.
In these situations artists have been required to be more and more accountable and the criteria used to measure ‘success’ has become more and more bureaucratic. Working intuitively does not sit well with accountability, or bureaucracy, so it gets written out - first by the institution and then by the artist. The guidelines and advice I received for residencies and funding opportunities often had very specific objectives and outcomes – rarely did these prioritise intuitive practices. Over time I learnt to write proposals that did not refer to, or give space for, working intuitively.
Both my degree and my Masters encouraged (required) me to think very deliberately about what I was making. Perhaps because of my tendency to do this anyway I allowed the thinking to take over. Maybe I didn’t trust myself, and I found that rather than developing a sense of confidence and trust in my practice, I developed ways of working that were supported by external structures (for example socio-cultural theory and politics).
It has been a long time since I allowed myself to make work because ‘it felt right’. I made it because it ‘explored’, ‘challenged’, ‘investigated’ ... ‘notions of male identity’ for example. My identity as an artist was so shaky that (with hindsight) I think I ended up making work that demonstrated my artist’s statement rather than the other way around.
I get the sense that in Sweden artists (like any other profession) are trusted to know what they are doing. Perhaps this sense of trust has rubbed off on me, or perhaps I was in a position to let myself feel it.
In Stockholm I believe that I have found an environment and culture that provides artists with both time and space to work intuitively, not least through the emphasis on supporting process as well as product.
Reflecting on your response I am wondering what we actually mean when we talk about an ‘intuitive’ way of working. I am very interested to hear how it shows itself in your process and in your work.
Maybe we don’t mean the same thing! For me it’s about working in a way that I don’t try to understand, or at least not while I’m doing it. Somewhere along the way I lost my ability to trust my intuition, I questioned everything before and during the making of an artwork. I remember having ideas and deciding not to follow them because I couldn’t think through the entire process. I can see now that I had become quite obsessed with rationalising every material and every process before I even engaged with them. This obsession kept tripping me up and making my life hard. It also made my art hard – my own version of intellectual rigour won over other sensibilities every time.
In the last couple of years I have rediscovered my ability to trust my judgements without necessarily understanding them. And this has led to a better balance between my critical and intuitive selves.
What is the opposite of intuitive? Is it conceptual, academic, deliberate, critical? Whatever it is, the relation between the two is a sliding scale and I had slid way too far to the non-intuitive end. That is why I am able to say that I am now working in a ‘more intuitive way’, rather than in an ‘intuitive way’.
This more intuitive way of working shows itself in processes that are more flexible. At a basic level it allows me to do what feels right rather than what I can rationalise in words or thoughts. In relation to the work itself I’m not sure how my more intuitive ways of working show themselves, perhaps they don’t show themselves at all. My hope is that if they do show themselves that they are not obvious. I simply want the work to have a wholeness that comes from both deliberate and intuitive processes. I hope that there is the sense that something is ‘going-on’, that you can’t quite put your finger on it but there is definitely stuff happening.
I keep coming back to and thinking around the word ‘confident’. Perhaps my more intuitive way of working enables me to make more confident work. It certainly enables me to have a lighter touch and to have more fun. And this I think is evident in my more recent work, for example Go-Go (2009) and Play (2010).
I am also thinking about the difference between ‘intuitive’ and ‘confident’ – something about having the confidence to leave yourself alone, at least in the making process. Please tell us more about these two pieces you mention, Go-Go (2009) and Play (2010).
I’m enjoying the confidence to let myself ‘be’. Somehow this being myself is good and productive. Returning to your original question about my move to Stockholm, I can say that I find it easier to let myself ‘be’ in Stockholm than I do in London.
That I could call a piece of work Go-Go still makes me smile – it’s such a frivolous title. The piece was made specifically for M2 Gallery who have a very particular exhibition space – a metre square window on a predominantly residential street in south London. The window is straight on to the street and you can walk right up to it, the space behind the window is half a cubic metre. The gallery is an integral part of the building which also includes the gallery directors’ own studio and architectural practice and as well as their private residence. I had the idea to make something that was sensitive to the site – in terms of both the physical location and some of the ambitions of the artist and architect who live there.
In my studio I made a full-scale model of the gallery and started playing with materials. I also kept a sketchbook and jotted down new ideas as they came to me. After a couple of months I made a quick drawing of what would become the final piece. Go-Go consists of two solar powered mirror balls and spot-lights that come on as the sun sets, and run until they have the exhausted their battery. The piece works on its own terms as a visual thing. There are also various ways of ‘reading’ it depending on how much you know about me and my past work. I resist verbalising or writing too much about it because speaking and writing requires an ordering of thoughts that I prefer to remain un-ordered (this is not the same as them being confused!).
When I do speak about Go-Go I find myself holding my hands as if I’m turning an invisible ball between them – this gesture is my way of suggesting that my process and the piece is spherical rather than linear. I really don’t want to start saying what the work is about, at least not until people have seen it, I want them to experience it first, then we can talk about it. The short text I wrote for the installation was playful and made references to the quite obvious sexual symbolism in the piece, I hope that I managed to make the double entendres function well.
Play is another fun word, and as a title it works in many different ways. The title for the installation came to me as I cycled home after proposing the work to MOCA London. I can’t think of another occasion when I went to a gallery with such a strong but vague idea for an exhibition. I intuitively knew that the piece was good and that it would work in that particular gallery, and that gave me the confidence to propose it with little more than two pictures of studio experiments. I also know the gallery director quite well as he had invited me to participate in a project of his two years earlier. The piece was made on site and it was a laborious process, taking over six days. I really enjoyed seeing the installation taking shape and the time it took allowed me to think about and around it.
Play is a wall of videotape that bisects the gallery. For MOCA the wall was three and a half metres high, four and a half metres wide and twenty centimetres thick. The videotape is used gay pornography. Working in the gallery (mostly on my own) allowed me to continue the creative process that had started over a year earlier in the studio. I started playing with videotape before I did the residency in Stockholm however it wasn’t until I had completed the residency and made a second extended visit to Stockholm that I felt that I could develop the idea into the complete piece. By the time I was installing it I was literally ‘thinking through the work’ – and I mean ‘work’ as both a noun and a verb.
I was really pleased with the responses Play received. Many people said that seeing it - that is actually being in the gallery with it - was so different from reading about it (in the press release for example). For me it is a successful piece because it is greater than the sum of its parts. It is more than the idea, more than the material – it is a thing in itself.
I really enjoyed making both these pieces and I’ve been surprised and delighted with the way they’ve turned out. They have both ‘done’ things that I wasn’t expecting, and in that way I feel as though they have been collaborations. I want to continue working in this way and am looking forward to establishing my studio in Stockholm.
First published on Artists Talking, January 2011, www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking
Stuart Mayes’ body of sculptural works has grown out of his long-term performance-art practice. Often incorporating traditional, practical craftwork - such as sewing - Mayes’ sculptures explore notions of masculinity through a domestic vocabulary that relies on memories of old-fashioned suburban values. While the range of Mayes’ subjects takes in bawdiness, tragedy, and sentimentality, each is handled with a rigorously controlled aesthetic of terrifying restraint. Perhaps the true subject of Mayes’ work is precisely this maddening British quality: phlegmatic restraint in the face of necessary, turbulent emotions.
London-based conceptual artist Stuart Mayes makes good use of the stuff most of us take for granted. Working with articles traditionally made for men, he recreates the mundane and the commonplace into bespoke items of beauty. In previous London shows he has painstakingly restitched red and white shirts so that the patchwork appears like molecular blood cells in a wall piece entitled Exchange. Hot water bottles in Sensible Bedfellow turn mutant and elsewhere, urinal bottles becomes smothered in trashy blue glitter. Mayes creates a world in which masculinity and male etiquette become unpicked.
Why work with these objects?
I was originally doing a lot of performance. After a performance there’s usually debris but mine were about sealing things up in a very English, male way: by sewing a white shirt, with white thread, in a white room with white lights. People became interested in the finished objects and I realised that the pieces could have a life beyond me. So I started to work with installations using shirts. Most male clothing is unisex, whereas shirts, male handkerchiefs and ties are about masculinity. They are aspirational and about status and precision. In the business world men are allowed some colour in a shirt or tie. I twist the meaning of the object and try to do it in a celebratory way.
The shirts used in Climb and Exchange are the same size as the actual shirt. Is that deliberate?
I’m interested in things that already exist in the world. My works are familiar and not so abstract that they become alienating. I work to the size of a handkerchief or a pillowcase, so it’s comfortable but a the same time it’s not because I’ve done something to it.
Do you have a fetish for Englishmen and shirts?
No, it’s not erotic, more my fascination. I’m interested in systems and the way that men organise the world. The cells on the shirts are connective, for example, and I guess it’s like business meetings where men shake hands. There’s physical contact, but it’s momentary. You have these meetings and you touch the palms of your hands together, which is an intimate area. It’s odd in such a formal environment.
How long does each piece take?
Three to four months but I can’t work on them all the time. I get uptight about the grain and fabric - each forearm must match the real dimension. I tend to zone out but I have to be very specific and particular while I’m doing them because I have to cut each one out in paper, then fabric, then tack, sew, press and hem it. Each one is unique and autobiographical because I wore them. In a sense, they are beyond fashion.
And now you’re working with disposable urinal bottles ...
Yes, they are odd objects. I came into contact with them with hospital visits with my partner John who has motor neurone disease. These urinals are about male fragility, they are not celebrating masculinity. They are not for the physically fit man. Death and beauty interests me a lot because beauty is the only thing that makes death palatable. I’ve worked a lot with kids and the first things they do to make something beautiful is to cover it in glitter. Glitter is camp, throwaway and we always think of it as part of the stage show. I’m trying to transform them [urinal bottles] into beautiful things by getting people to look at them in a different way.