AnOther speaks with British born artist Richard Wilson about his choice of unusual materials, his new commission for Heathrow’s Terminal 2, and about breaking the rules...
British born artist Richard Wilson (b. 1953) has been creating work for over 30 years. Having been nominated twice for the Turner Prize, in 1988 and 1989, he is widely regarded around the world for his awe-inspiring, often large-scale works, which explore and create unique dialogues and juxtapositions between art and architecture. AnOther speaks with the artist about his choice of unusual materials, his new commission for Heathrow’s Terminal 2, and about breaking the rules.
You are best known for your work using installation and sculpture, in particularly the divergence of art and architecture. Why did you first start working in that medium and what attracted you to it?
I’ve worked for many years in the worlds of art and architecture, and really what it comes down to is that I like playing around with space. Rather than creating my own spaces, it’s easier to go to pre-existing architecture, and to tweak or adapt it, or even undo spaces that already exist, to create something completely unexpected. In doing so, I like to question the idea of what we take for granted, which forces us to take a second look. Unlike a lot of artists, I don’t have a vocabulary of spaces in my head, but instead I have to go to existing sites and then I start to adapt and change it. The scale of my work is often large, not because I create things that size but because I’m working within a pre-existing architectural scale. My aim is not to brutalise architecture, but to sensitively tweak it.
When designing these large-scale architectural works, how involved are you in the engineering aspects, or do you rely on experts to help you?
Over the years I’ve gained a reputation for doing some very big, daring works that require a large budget. In these instances you have to rely on engineering friends, and I regularly work alongside engineers Price & Myers, and Commercial Systems International in Hull to make these pieces possible. When working on something of this scale that is going to sit in the public domain, you have to play it safe and make sure that nothing goes wrong. Working alongside engineers means that everything is checked and totally safe, despite the fact that some of the works look dangerous! We get away with theatrical tricks because we know that the engineers have made sure it's safe.
In keeping with this idea of the unexpected, do you like seeing viewers’ reactions to your works?
I like the notion of spectacle. Some artists don’t seem to like that word, but for me spectacle is often missing in our lives because of health and safety. One is being dumbed down all the time, but if you can do something like make a building move, then people actually stop and take notice. They get excited! I like that feeling of grabbing someone’s attention. Once you’ve got that, you can start unfolding the idea on many levels, including challenging our typical preconceptions of our world and how it’s built. Our skylines are changing every month, yet one thinks of architecture as a slow moving event. So yes I subvert to get powerful responses. On another level it’s also a metaphor – if you can challenge the notion of architecture by challenging what architecture is and making it do things that architecture doesn’t normally do, then you’re actually challenging all the rules – if you look at something in a different way then those rules can be altered.
"My aim is not to brutalise architecture, but to sensitively tweak it"
One of your arguably best-known works is 20:50, a room filled with oil, currently in the Saatchi collection. What was the motivation behind it, and do you feel it’s as seminal as critics make out?
For me this piece was a wonderfully seminal work, which came at a very good time in my career. It’s been my calling card around the world. Wherever I travel people always ask me what materials I use in my work, and then when I mention the oil people go back on their heels! But they always know exactly which piece I’m referring to. At the time, it was a very daring thing to do – taking the pristine white interior of the gallery and filling it with a hazardous waste material, finding ways around the rules. But when people see it they start talking about the waste material in terms of beauty, which means I’ve changed the fundamentals of people’s perspectives. Coming from this different perspective, we can make that waste beautiful. It’s about transforming the room, about making an architect’s space seem much bigger in it’s interior than it’s exterior, a kind of illusion.
Over the years, the piece has been shown in a number of settings around the world. Has the reaction to it changed?
Everyone that sees the oil in any situation is amazed by it, however those that have seen more than one installation tend to have a favourite. The ingredients remain the same, but the focus changes. When the building that houses it changes so does the reflection, and different, unseen parts of the building are revealed.
Your work has been shown around the world, including representing Britain in the Venice Biennale. What has been your biggest achievement to date?
I’ve had different achievements based on different ambitions. With 20:50 it was an amazing achievement because it caught the public’s imagination. Another work called She Came In Through The Bathroom Window, which was made in 1989, was a great achievement for me. For this work I cut a window out of a gallery in east London and brought it into the room, it was quite opposite to the oil piece.
You’ve recently been commissioned to create Slipstream, a sculpture for London Heathrow’s brand new Terminal 2. Can you tell us about the piece?
Slipstream is a commission for the new Heathrow Airport Terminal 2, an enormous sculpture weighing 77 tonnes and 80 metres long, made in polished aluminum. It’s a stationery sculpture that describes the movement of an airplane, not as it flies, but as if it were at first tumbling in space, but then collects itself and moves upwards again. We’ve built it using aero-technology, and it’s been 3 years in the making and designing, including hundreds of hours creating it first in the virtual world, and then fabricating each section and assembling it like you would a three piece suit, working from a pattern. Right now, six pieces of the 23 are already installed in situ, with the rest to be finished before it’s revealed to the public next Spring just prior to the opening of the new terminal. What's so fantastic about this commission is that the new terminal will allow departures and arrivals of up to 20 million people every year, so I’ve got a fantastic audience for my work.
Apart from the Heathrow commission, what else are you working on?
There’s a lot going on this year, but next up is A Ship’s Opera which I’ve created with artists Zatorski + Zatorski. The performance is happening as part of The Mayor’s Thames Festival in September, and will see a fleet of historic vessels the performing a live, moving, operatic concerto of ships’ steam whistles, bells, horns, hooters, and guns. It’s going to be a very big visual spectacle. I’m also meeting with a museum in Japan about installing 20:50 there, and I’m in talks about a solo exhibition in London in 2014.
This week you are speaking as part of the A Might Big If series at the new members club The House of St Barnabas in London’s Soho. How did you get involved?
Richard Strange who is hosting the conversation, is a very old friend who I’ve known since the 70s. We always got on well and have remained friends ever since. We’ve done a talk together before and it went very well, and so we thought it would be good to revisit it in aid of The House of St Barnabas, which provides support for the homeless through money raised by membership fees. It’s always good to clear the conscience!
Richard Wilson is in conversation with Richard Strange at The House of St Barnabas in Soho, London tonight. For tickets and more information click here.
Text by Siobhan Andrews
