Why build a pavilion in the middle of the Rotunda?

It was an invitation to make something for the Rotunda here, but a film very specifically, so from nothing. And so the context, of course, is always very important. So, I was very aware of the Rotunda and, of course, of the mural and the relation of that mural to the compass points of the world, but very much in relation to nineteenth century colonialism, which, of course, is a huge issue in Britain, too, which is where I'm from. So, I was very aware of making something underneath this mural. And also because it's film, I knew that I had to make a pavilion or something that would cut out the light.

Can you tell us about your work Geography Biography?

I collect postcards. I have a big postcard collection. And I realized also in terms of my 40 years of making films, that I actually had travelled a lot for my films. So, I ended up thinking about geography through my own biography. And the title came about, really, when I was actually filming and thinking; I said, “Well, this is like geography, you know, through biography”. And that's actually what it is. So, I called it what it is. It's geography, biography. And I'm not, you know, I've never made a… I'm not someone who's ever really put myself into my films. With the exception of Antigone, where I was put in by accident, I'm generally not in my films. And actually, I recoil from it. So for me, it was very exposing to do this.

I've been making 16 mm films since the eighties, and then all my Super 8 and Standard 8. And the thing about film is that you keep these films. So, I have boxes of these little rolls of Super 8 film so I could go back to them. I hadn't been, you know, looked at them for 30 years, and some of it is real juvenilia. It's like my student work, you know, and at a certain point, I stopped using Super 8. So, it only goes to about the mid-nineties. And then I started making my 16 mm films. So because it's a physical medium, you know, I have a cutting table in my studio, and everything that you don't use in English is called “cutting room floor”. And I don't think there's an equivalent word in French. I think it’s les chutes. And there's a term in English where you say, if an actor will say, “I was cutting room floor”, which they were filmed in the film, but they never made it in, so they were cutting room floor. So, I had all my outtakes from my films, the bits that were never in the film. And I used those and my Super 8 films to make a new film with my masking technique. So, it's technically extremely complicated.

But basically, I can mask in the film gate. I can film different parts of the film frame. And what I did is I used those different masks to film my old film, my old Super 8 footage, Standard 8. And so what you have embedded in one film frame is all these different film gages. So, Super 8, Standard 8, 16 mm, 35. And then often I put it in these… the backdrop is one of my postcards. And that came out of a sort of practical need to put something with texture so that the grain conflict between Super 8 and 35 was quite immense, so it allowed it to be more embedded in the film frame.

What different media do you work with?

Mediums are very important, so I like to use lots of them. You know, I think artists have that freedom. And one of my fights with the film industry was to say, “You've got two mediums now, film and digital. Use both of them, exploit them for what their particularities are”. As an argument to keeping film, obviously. So, you know, chalk, photograph, or, printing ink, paint, these are all…. When I was invited to do something here, I really wanted to exemplify many mediums because I think it's great to show how free artists can be in relation to medium. So historically, like chalk, you know, that began so long ago, and I'm still doing it. When I was a student, I was at a postgraduate in London, the walls were made of material, and I couldn't, and I never was…. I never made canvases. So, I put a four-by-eight-foot piece of Masonite or blackboard on the wall and one day, I painted it with blackboard paint and started working sort of with chalk on black, sort of in the negative, as it were, and carried that through life, actually. I mean, even physically carried the boards down to my next space and then to the next one. The Wreck of Hope is the third in three drawings I made, which are like kind of white, white on white landscape, where something happens. So the first one was The Montafon Letter, which was an avalanche. And so, it was the collapse of the snow. And then the second one was a chalk cliff collapsing. And then this one is the melting of ice so that there’s a…. And it's like, it's chalk. It's the whiteness of the landscape.

What is the dialogue with the 19th-century marouflaged canvas overhanging the pavilion?

I have made a lot of films historically relating to the circle or the cycle. I mean, even literally, the circle of light, anything that involves a circle, is immediately attractive to me because it has the cycle of time in it. And, you know, with the mural, as I said already, this is, when I first saw it, it also deals to some extent with seasonal time or what looks like it. But actually, it turns out it's much more to do with a sort of nineteenth century French imagination about elsewhere, in a way. But, of course, these are state-protected paintings and it's… there's a hell of a beauty to it. It is a beautiful thing. And I was situating myself beneath the mural and I… and it made me make… The film that I made was, you know, really thinking about what that means. And then the privilege of travel, which, as a kid, I was the kid with the Super 8 camera, so I had the privilege of travel. So, it was made underneath it, this mural, but it wasn't made in any direct reference to it, which is important geographically.

I'm situated in the Rotunda underneath it. And the films, they move around in echo of the cylindricality of it, of the mural. So I'm very conscious of that. But it's my geography. That's the point about Geography, Biography. It's my geography and how it, you know, geography and the world has played a role in my filmmaking life.

How would you describe your relationship with the seasons?

The whole point about Gallery Two is that I made these four… I mean, there's more than four, but there's four areas of work around the seasons. To some extent, it wasn't the subject; it was the framework, which is very, very important. You know, I went to Japan and I photographed the oldest sakura trees in blossom. And downstairs it's Jindai Sakura, which is 2,000 years old, and Taki Sakura, which is 1,500 years old. 

And then, The Wreck of Hope is all about a collective memory, in a sense, because it's about the destruction of, you know, the melting of the Arctic or the Polar Arctic, or basically the melting of ice. That's Antarctica. It's the destruction of our planet. To some extent, how it was, was a collective memory that we are losing. So, I guess there's always something about disappearance in what I do.

How would you like visitors to experience your work?

I mean, the point is about an artist. An artist makes something and then they leave it somewhere and then people see it and at that point, the artist isn't there anymore. So, it's all about the biography of the viewer and the work, you know, the best work doesn't impose any… is not didactic. It makes the person looking at it go somewhere that I will never know. You know, that's the whole point about memory, is that they will get their memories from it, but I don't know what they are, and I can't guide those memories. It's something that, when I know this as a viewer, if I go there, I look at something, I will be thinking about something completely that I hadn't. And that's the best, that's the best relationship that exists in art, is that relationship between the silence of the viewer and what they're looking at and where they go in their heads. And that's what art is.

Can you tell us about the title of your work The Wreck of Hope?

The title comes from Caspar David Friedrich. I've always loved that painting, and I always knew it as The Wreck of Hope. But there are other titles for it. It's a boat, a ship that's stuck and frozen in an ice cap, that's stuck, you know, that it's there, and then it will, and it collapses. It's a shipwreck, I guess, but through ice. And I just always love that title, and I've always loved that painting. I had the title before the work, in a way. I just somehow, right now, there is a slight “wreck of hope”. And I don't want to be grandiose, but I do feel a panic about the world. I mean, about, of course, global warming and the… But also I find there's a panic about everything, I mean, politically. And so, that title is such a powerful title: The Wreck of Hope.

How did you create this work?

I decided to draw, for me, something that's so emblematic of that, which is the fact that we are losing these ice caps, this ice universe that's been there for millennia, and then it's kind of melting in real time. We are watching it in our little lifespan. We are watching it melt in real time, and that is awful. So, all I can do is to make a drawing about it. With The Wreck of Hope, that was a huge endeavour, because it's just me and a piece of school chalk and time. That's it. And the time is embedded in its manufacture, because I write, you know, I go in and I write the date or something, and then that gets lost in the drawing. But very occasionally, you can still see it, like August, you know, and September the second. The more near the end, you can read the dates more clearly, and I always write down what happens, like, a friend of mine died, so his name's on it. Salman Rushdie got stabbed, and he's written on it. And there was a Sidney Felsen who's Gemini G.E.L. He's the printmaker I work with in LA. He turned 98, so I wrote “98 Sydney”, you know, and “Happy Birthday”. Like, little, little notes. And, you know, sometimes they just get obliterated, but they're in there because it's part of the sedimentation of time. It’s in the process of drawing as well. And it was a huge labour. I didn't do anything else.

What is your relationship with the sakura trees of Japan?

What attracted me to the sakura trees was, you know, everyone loves them, but for me, it was the sakura surgery, as they call it. It was all the, like, the walking sticks, the props and this ancient tree being kept up by this care, this human care. And I've always, God knows why, been attracted very much to aging, you know. I mean, obviously, people like, I filmed Merce Cunningham and Mario Merz and Luchita Hurtado. She was 99 and a half. And this aging is always very, very interesting to me, because I always think a human and a tree, they carry so much life in their fabric of their physical bodies. And that's what interests me. That was the moment I thought, oh, my God, I have to go and photograph that. Because the props are a major part of the motivation. And with the two that I have downstairs, Jindai Sakura was the oldest one, and she was, for me, a very female tree. It was very much like a little old woman, really shrunk, very small.

So, it wasn't dramatic, actually. It wasn't like the others, like Taki Sakura, which was this huge, splendid tree. So she was kind of gnarled and small with lots of walking sticks and lots of things around her, you know, so not a lot of space. But I just thought it was such a powerful symbol of, you know, endurance in a way, because what happened with Taki Sakura is that it was… So, the bulbs, the blossom was closed, basically, and we sat in a sort of sad vigil thinking it wasn't going to open. And then on the last possible day, suddenly it started to open before our eyes. It was incredible. So that by the beginning of the day and the end of the day, it had changed. And what was so great about that? Because the first moment it opens, it's this incredible pink. But then, like, 24 hours later, it's already become whiter and dissipated. But because it was that first moment, it's this incredible pink. And that's because it's only, like 70% open. You know, it's not even officially open in a way, even though it was very stressful whether we would get even any bloom. And then we got the bloom. But it's very beautiful because it's the gift of colour. It's giving me this beautiful, coloured tree, even though it's not a kind of widely full bloom.

Which season are you most looking forward to?

I've always loved autumn. Maybe that's because I'm a tiny bit melancholic. I love spring too now. I mean, I'm getting more into spring than autumn now. I've got a garden, but I do. I used to love autumn. Because when I was a country child, I used to have, you know, mushrooms and that sense of decomposition. And the work I've made about autumn… well, not about it, but if there is a designation to the works, is “telomere”. It's basically made of marks. It's four photogravures, which is about found marks.

I found something with all these marks and I trace them and redraw them. So, it's the accumulation of marks and I “telomere” its attrition through accumulation, so it gets more and more and more marks across the four photogravures. And so, of course, autumn is a bit like that. And the whole point about “telomere” is the older we get, we actually accumulate, but become more and more inefficient. You know, it's also the autumn of life, I guess.

How do you approach the digital medium?

Everything I do is existing in the time that I'm living in now. You know, I have to resist this idea that film is a nostalgic medium, because it actually isn't. And it's a wonderful, rich medium that I want to encourage the younger generation to use for everything that digital isn't. I mean, the whole point is that it's a different medium. You know, both are great. You can use both. I'm not a Luddite, I use digital. I go through a digital… I don't actually finally present my work as digital. That's the point. But there's always an element of digital in the manufacture of it.