MNG: In the past your work has taken a humorous look at masculinity as it manifests locally. This new work seems to be about the anxieties of parenting, but there are some tongue-in-cheek references to 'child prodigies' and 'o my child could do that' attitudes to art. The humour of the small bronzes off-sets that very sad clown. What was your thinking there?
SE: Parenting has to be the toughest yet most rewarding job in the universe. But it comes with enormous responsibility – a responsibility that translates to a universal anxiety which I can only imagine all parents must experience. We want to protect our children from all dangers but realise the need to instil them with the skills and tools necessary to negotiate a not-always friendly world.
Apparently children laugh on average 300 times a day. Adults laugh on average only 15 times a day. Why is that? I guess for adults, it is RESPONSIBILITY and the knowledge that innocence is only short-lived.
Give a child a few blocks of ‘Dukit’ (bakeable modelling plastcine) and within minutes the baking tray will be full with playful, colourful forms. Give an adult the same material and they will likely over-think the process, the material and the expected outcome until the whole exercise becomes unproductive or silly.
The reference to ‘child prodigies’ is intentionally tongue-in-cheek. Yes ‘one’s child could do that’, they could make the ‘Dukit’ marquettes - they take only minutes. But to then employ the complicated and costly process of enlarging the marquettes, making silicone rubber moulds and finally casting in bronze and painting them, is just absurd, stupid even.
We are so accustomed to seeing the bronze uber-monument, so a tiny brightly painted bronze on a narrow plinth, a scaled-up figure by one of your three children - actually a whole series of painted bronzes - is quite another experience.
Why paint the bronzes? Why scale up children's marquettes? So many people seem to take offence at the idea of painted bronze. I don’t understand why. Traders of scrap metal value bronze quite differently to the art world even though many of the industrial scrap forms found at a yard could well have come from the same furnace used to produce a bronze sculpture.
Bronze is not a precious metal, yet to my children it represents treasure. They would often sift through the foundry sand in search of small bronze spills. We would polish the small pieces and they would trade them like gold at school.
The colour (paint) applied to the finished bronzes brought all the joy back to the forms. Unpainted, the sculptures were bronze forms first and foremost. They spoke of the material and it’s history. By painting the objects the material and the history remained but came second to form and colour. The glossy paint finish heightens the desire to touch and hold the objects at which point the weight also revealed the material.
The huge drawing also looked fantastic as bare aluminium, however the material once again dominated, diminishing the importance of the line. By powder coating the drawing black the line became all important and the aluminium all but disappeared. By scaling-up my children’s marquettes in bronze I was effectively monumentalising their work - making permanent things that would otherwise eventually disappear into the ether (trash).
MNG: You have written about wanting to give your children a positive experience of having an artist as a father? How did you do that in relation to this exhibition?
SE: It is really important to me that I spend loads of quality time with my family. Like most parents, this requires juggling work commitments and domestic duties in order to create that time. I want my children to remember me as a good family man. By including my children in the process of making the exhibition Stupid Stupid Stupid Stupid Stupid Daddy, we got to spend lots of time together and rather than my work be something foreign to them they took ownership of the forms, the ideas and even the titles.
MNG: Dubuffet and other Modernists were of course interested in the drawings of children, and you have mentioned Modernism in the context of the exhibition. What was your thinking there?
SE: Give a young child a pencil and paper and they will immediately produce marks/images. They do not hesitate. It was the freeing from intellectual concerns that affected Jean Dubuffet’s interest in ‘Outsider Art’ and art produced by children. He recognised in the work, an unlocking of the artists’ most basic creative instincts, a strategy he employed in the production of his own work which he chose to term “raw art”(Art Brut).
Personally I am not sure it is possible for an art-schooled adult, to free him/herself completely from intellectual concerns. I had great difficulty making and justifying the making of my own abstract clay forms as they were not honest. My children made them honest.
That said, I cannot help but be impressed by Urs Fischer’s recent hulking, lumpy cast aluminium sculptures which are simply scaled-up handfuls of squeezed clay. Despite their fully abstract forms the sculptures are still humanlike; in fact, they remind me a lot of the figurative bronzes produced by Willem de Kooning in the 1970’s. It seems it is difficult to escape the figure. Even my children found it necessary to give most the works human or animal related titles.
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