What are you doing here?
This is where
I sit with my gloves and do
quite a lot of making and planning.
A lot of the work I do is large-scale,
outside in cities and landscapes.
Here is really a room for planning and thinking things through
and making small scale works.
I can't help making.
You get into a creative flow here.
Yes.
It's a great, it's very colourful.
It's very peaceful despite the railway, motorway…
everything that's going on.
It's a very still building.
Will you show me around a little bit?
Yes.
This is a thing that somebody gave to me,
my friend Ada and were talking around it,
and I got into hysterics laughing yesterday thinking that it looked like Rambo.
Some neighbours have recently moved in.
It used to be just
storage on both sides.
So I could have my…
I could sing in here.
For example, I sing quite a lot.
Now that there's all these people around,
I can hear them literally breathing,
I have to tone down…
These are the colours that…
do you choose your colours
or just go with whatever comes your way?
I choose them.
I buy my felt from a wonderful company in Germany.
They've been going from mother
to daughter since the 1830s.
Nice, that's a lovely story.
And these are from them, or from someone else?
These are pompoms that are made by my friend Elena
who is very kind.
She's a very old lady,
she sits in her wonderful bed
and makes pompoms and give them to me.
So I decided that I was going to make
a work out of her pompoms.
Do you often work in collaboration?
How do you come up ideas?
I do a lot of collaborations as well.
I'm doing a collaboration at the moment,
a very long term collaboration with a
Russian physicist called Kostya Novoselov
who discovered this material called graphene.
We're doing a fairly long term project called "Everything is Connected"
which we've done in London in Selfridges,
they put us in a glass box
in the window itself,
we invited people to come and ask us questions and make
suggestions
to where we should our Everything is Connected project.
We've done it in Barcelona and Manchester,
all over Europe.
Do you do a lot of different things
like performance and installation?
I do a lot of installation work, I do some performance work,
and also participatory performance.
At Manifesta we got the whole city, really.
We did a procession from one side
of the city to to the other,
with thousands and thousands
of people dancing.
I organised all these bands and banners.
Linking things, this looks like it's
connecting lots of elements to this?
Well, this is my existential artist
daybed,
that was given to me by my friend Grant
who said if you're going to be a good artist
you have to be able to lie
around and languish.
So this is where I lie around and go:
"oh, my life is in ruins! I'm never gonna manage!"
You got all these words around to encourage you.
How do you work with words?
How do words work with you?
Is it from from childhood or
now, what's your relationship with these words?
I've always found a home in words.
I started out writing out words and poems and essays,
to myself and sewing them into my clothes
and carrying them around with me,
lining my clothes with them.
It's quite embarrassing,
to have you in here where they are literally notes to myself.
This is like forcing myself to not be too scattered
in the way I'm going to do my work.
That is something that Sarah Lucas said about how
you have to be actually involved
if you want to move forward
rather than what you might sometimes feel inclined to,
to  just hide underneath the motorway
and wait for people to come and find you,
which they won't.
I think my work is quite –
I'm trying to be constructive
and socially engaged with my work,
trying to make a positive contribution
towards building a better future.
There's not much point
in doing it by myself.
So I have to push myself to get out there.
Really interesting,
because you work with your hands
on one thing at a time,
but at the same time
and it has a big effect.
I feel like the power of one thing at a time is quite…
It's better way to organise yourself…
Like General Eisenhower falling
down the stairs of his aircraft,
because – people said he was too stupid to walk and chew gum at the same time.
Really?
I'm a bit like that!
So you just cut away and see how you…
Yeah, do whatever you like.
My kids come in here and
and he would colour
and now my daughter is using oil paint
and on the sewing machine my daughter has been making masks
for a charity for coronavirus.
It's very nice having you in here, thank you very much for coming!
