Bill Woodrow

Peter Hill

The Albury Wodonga Superfiction 1993

Collaboration Peter Hill and J.J. Voss (Photographer)

Bill Woodrow

Peter Hill: Your exhibition at the Fruitmarket Gallery is your first solo show in Britain for three years. How do you feel about it?

Bill Woodrow: I’m very happy with it. For me it was an exhibition worth waiting for because it includes some large scale sculptures which haven’t been shown in Britain before. One of the reasons I waited so long for such a show is because I wanted to show these works in a chronological sequence.

PH: Your most recent work seems to be richer in fantasy, sometimes surreal, sometimes baroque, grander in ambition and more eclectic in materials – compared to earlier, simpler, and more punning work such as Hoover Breakdown of 1979. Is this the direction in which you are moving?

BW: Yes, especially with some of the larger pieces. They’ve become a lot more complex as, over the years, the range of imagery has increased. I don’t consciously see them as baroque, but I certainly understand what you mean. I think they are a lot freer by contrast to the earlier works which were quite strict because of their simplicity.

BW: I’m more prepared not to try to use an amalgam of images, and not just one image with its host material. The original material is often incorporated into the sculpture now, in a very different way to previously. This allows another level of images to emerge – in the sense that the car bonnets with the giraffe going through, for example, actually act like architectural bridge-like structures. Whereas in some of the earlier work of four or five years ago they would just have been car bonnets with something else attached.

PH: In many of the recent works you seem to be using the world map in a variety of configurations – is that linked partly to the amount you have been travelling the globe in recent years?

BW: It is due partly to that and partly to the materials I have come across. At one point I found a whole pile of maps which I have used slowly. I first used them two years ago. I have both used and made globes, and there is one in my most recent work Self Portrait in a Nuclear Age.

PH: How important is it that your raw material is ‘found’? Would you go out and buy something if it was not otherwise available?

BW: I certainly would buy something if I wanted it. I’m not a purist in the sense of having to find materials. Things are found in skips, anywhere.

PH: So given that you are not a purist in that sense, where do you stand in relation to the tools of your trade? I was surprised to read in the catalogue that all the tools you use are hand-held rather than bench mounted, which contrasts sharply with the consumer goods you imply, such as washing machines, which are the end product of a heavy industrial process.

BW: This is done for convenience. I always go for the easiest way of making something. If that doesn’t work I will then move up to the next least technical way of doing it. As far as I’m concerned I want the quickest, simplest way of bringing two things together or abstracting something. One has more control over the technical side of the process, it is more immediate and one does not have to wait a week or two weeks for something to be fabricated or cast. I like the speed of making something to be as close as possible to the speed of my thoughts and decisions. If it was necessary though to use a power saw or an oxy-acetylene cutter then yes, I would go ahead and use it. But generally all my tools are contained in that small canvas bag over there, and I can jump on a plane and get straight to work wherever I land.

PH: So when you arrive in a foreign city how do you go about collecting materials?

BW: Usually I have a studio arranged, a place in which to work – it might just be a garage, and then I’ll get a van or a truck and somebody who knows the city will come with me and we’ll spend a couple of days just driving around looking at different places, relying to an extent on that person’s local knowledge. We will go and look at scrap yards, garages, city dumps, those sort of places. I could always find them myself, but it would take a little longer. And sometimes there is a language problem as well.

BW: There was one original piece where I did cut the surface metal of a household appliance, but I can trace it back further than that in a logical sequence which ended at that initial piece. One can pick out that sort of lineage in retrospect quite easily, although you do not realise it at the time.

PH: The first work that is illustrated in the catalogue, Untitled, of 1970 consists of a circle of corn in Soho Square, London, being pecked away by a horde of pigeons. You were clearly involved early in conceptual experiments.

BW: Yes, that dates from my time at St Martin’s, when I was in second year, I think. Much of my work was in that vein.

BW: Much later. I stopped being a student in 1972, and the appliance didn’t arrive until 1979.

PH: So was there a break in the mid-seventies when you stopped making art works?

BW: Yes, it was a deliberate choice. I had been working as a post-graduate student and this was quickly followed by a show, and some group shows, and then the mechanics of living, so to speak, had to be dealt with – getting a job, finding somewhere to live, not having a studio, having children. All those things took precedence and I made a decision while sorting all those things out I wouldn’t do any work, because I felt it wasn’t possible to do the two things well. And it was a good time to stop working anyway; one’s ideas are changing and one recognizes that it is time for directions to alter. I wasn’t satisfied with most of the ideas I had, and I did not have the means to make the other ideas, so it was a whole combination of things.

BW: I was unemployed for a year – which is not as long as graduates face these days. Then I got a job teaching on a foundation course which I did for eight or nine years upto 1980, in Essex. It was a full-time job, very time consuming, but it sorted out the financial side of things.

BW: There was a middle period, say from ’74 to ’78 when I might produce one or two things a year – just at home – and then I got a studio in 1978 and things started to change.

PH: I imagine even when you were not working, ideas were still being worked out in your head, possibilities considered.

BW: Not so much in the sense of any particular philosophy or manifesto. I just knew that I did not want to make work like I had made it before. As soon as I had made one piece of work I knew the old way of working was gone. That was an important moment. I just started making things in a fairly straightforward way as an attempt to get back into the routine of working.

PH: How much contact had you previously had with the other sculptors who are loosely grouped under the umbrella of the Lisson Gallery?

BW: Tony Cragg and I knew each other from our early student days. Richard Deacon was in the year after me at St Martin’s. From that period onwards we kept in contact and were very close friends. The others I got to know through the gallery.

PH: What really happened at St Martin’s with the succession from Moore to Caro and down to yourselves? Was it a progression or a rebellion?

BW: I think there is always an aspect of rebellion. In a sense that is what makes an art school education interesting – the fact that you can rebel. I remember the times at college when there was no rebellion against the mainstream, what happened was that work produced through mainstream teaching tended to be not particularly interesting.

PH: There is one particular work of yours I would now like to talk about. It is the only one of yours I have ever seen set in an open landscape. It is called Albero e Uccello. Why was it set outdoors?

BW: This work in one sense caused me a lot of problems. I took it outside to photograph it purely to make an invitation card for a show in Italy, and it happened to look fantastic in that particular setting – a very beautiful, dramatic landscape. The problem is that the actual structure of the sculpture is not strong enough to withstand being outside for any length of time. So it was just placed outdoors briefly for the photograph. My thinking about it is that I made it, like the rest of my work, for inside. It’s caused me problems because a lot of people have approached me about making outdoor work and I have had to disappoint them. I may do some in the future, but for the moment I have still to solve the problems this would entail.

PH: World it be worth taking works intended for the gallery outdoors just to photograph in a variety of landscapes and then return them to the studio or gallery? The landscape work would only exist as a photograph, in the same way that your corn and pigeons in Soho Square did…

BW: There is one other photograph of one of my works outdoors which the owners of it took. It doesn’t look too bad, but it still doesn’t solve the problem of the work being outdoors permanently. Weather and vandalism are the two main problems.

PH: Over the last two years you have created at least two self-portraits. What moved you into this traditional area?

BW: The first one was made early in 1985 for my second show with Barbara Gladstone in New York. It was just a thing I suddenly decided to do. I’d started making a work which had a hat in it, and as soon as I saw the hat I decided to carry on the figurative notion of the work – but without making an actual figure. I then decided that I would call this a self-portrait. I was very happy with that work. It seemed to express a lot of things about how I was feeling. The figure wasn’t there but the clothes suggested a self-portrait. There was the hat, and a canary in a cage at the bottom. It all had to do with the connotations of people being restricted within their environment. Recently I decided to make another, but with a figurative head.

PH: They are almost opposites in that in one the head is breaking free from the box while in the other the canary is caged.

BW: It’s a sort of Jack-in-the-box image with the head springing out; people pop out into the world and have to make the most of it. The head that I made has a globe inside. It is visible from the back of the head, like a brain, while the coat is the opposite – it is an exterior image with the shards of the map pinned to the outside of the coat. I think the work is about the comparison between appearance and ambition – what you are like inside your head. Contrasted with the outward manifestation of what you are.

PH: Was there a particular incident or inspiration behind Car Door, Armchair, and Incident, of 1981?

BW: That was one of several sculptures which I hoped would have a strong narrative in a literary sort of way. It was a response also to the sort of images I would see through the media, urban images of violence – you know they could be on a very domestic level or much more militarist, or at a street level. The particular one which you mentioned is quite seedy and domestic. I like the narrative to be read by literally following the material from one end to another.

PH: Do you see your work becoming more complex and multi-layered in terms of its references?

BW: More multi-layered – but I think the idea of complexity in a sculpture is quite a delicate one. The right balance must be found because if it is too complex it can defeat itself. I still like things to be economical.

BW: No, I make drawings as a separate activity. I’ve created a great deal over the last two years.

BW: They are drawings for their own sake. I suppose they do have similarities to the way the sculpture is made. But they are not drawings for sculpture.

PH: In The Still Waters where you use three mattresses, have you used paint on the surface of the mattresses or were the stains already there?

BW: I painted them. The mattresses are supposed to represent the waters of a river, and there is a large deer swimming through with its head up. The paint around it represents the waters being pushed aside.

PH: In a sense you do not question, as Tony Cragg might, where a painting ends and a sculpture begins. But might the addition of paint to your sculptures be a move in this direction?

BW: I have done some work that is more concerned with paint than with sculpture. But I don’t necessarily see a barrier between the two. There are two pieces in particular that hang on the wall and are painted – highly painted – images with three dimensional attachments. There is the screen from Life on Earth which is a collage of all the plastics from the chairs. Kimono uses flat images of the bonnets on the wall. After Hawaiian Punch I made Black Magic, White Tricks and I don’t know if you would call that a painting or a sculpture.

PH: Studying the catalogue I became intrigues by one work hanging in a car factory. What’s the story there?

BW: I was invited to go and work in the Renault car factory in France – for a month – along with twelve other artists. The factory was celebrating its 25th year and there was a lot happening – concerts, poetry, installations. We could, theoretically, use any of the processes and materials in the factory. In reality there were limitations – for example it was impossible to interrupt the conveyor belts. But it was a fantastic project. Although I was dubious about it at first because one had to work in the factory the whole time – next to the assembly lines with no privacy at all. It was tough to start with, and there were language problems, but it grew to be very enjoyable.
It was mainly women in the factory. They were sewing up car seat covers. They were very quizzical about my work. What I did was to suspend two cars side by side on the wall with their doors open. This created a space through the middle of the work in which I hung domestic items like a clothes iron. The women couldn’t understand why I would want to use a clothes iron until I explained that life can sometimes seem like a conveyor belt – and that was what I had created through the centre of the cars. The women identified with the iron and through that came to appreciate the work.

BW: Yes. That is what I need in my studio. My preference is not to have people watching me when I am working. I don’t use assistants. That is why the work in France was so strange.

BW: Shows in Munich, London, and New York, which all involve lots of travelling – which I enjoy. One of the great things about the last few years is that I have been able to visit cities all over the world, see new landscapes and original art works that in the past I had only read about and dreamed about.