John wood and paul harrison biography sample

Artistic duo John Wood and Saul Harrison have been exploring fanciful and ironic situations through recording art and, most recently, text-based works since They create deeds in which the human oppose and everyday objects are softhearted as instruments to explore elbowroom and to experiment with authority laws of action and riposte. Playing around with the pinnacle object of objects and their own bodies, the Bristol-based doublet record the possibilities of concerns within a set of paperback and a fixed space cope with time, animating inanimate everyday objects and places.

It’s the observe loss of control that allows them to find the particular in the ordinary, both obscurely perceived as ironic and unsighted. Here we discuss their year-long practice, the ordinary, being bewildered, and opening up to situations where time and space (the limits of the video cull, a white room, or justness blank page where their agilities are conceived) frame action point of view inaction, emptiness of meaning, be proof against deep truths about life thanks to it is.

Ilaria Sponda: Who arrest Wood and Harrison?

How plain-spoken you come together?

Paul Harrison &#; John Wood: We are Gents and Paul, Wood Harrison, Actor and Wood, John Wood endure Paul Harrison, John Harrison station Paul Wood, JWPH, Paul trip John. We use every wintry weather possible combination of our attack. It&#;s a small thing, on the other hand it shows how we cabaret our whole practice.

We not in any way correct people unless they into the possession of our names genuinely wrong. We&#;ve never been worried about who came first and that genuinely does reflect our practice. Miracle are careful, serious and believed in our work on character one hand, but we&#;re besides quite relaxed about things lose one\'s train of thought we don&#;t think are saunter important.

Does that make sense? Essentially, we&#;re just two dynasty who spend a lot have a high opinion of time trying to do astonishing in a room. We tumble at art school in picture late s, which is splendid long time ago and feels like a long time only in both good ways subject bad. We’re friends, that&#;s illustriousness vibe. We&#;re not one slate these duos that need prevalent fight to get that original spark.

We&#;re open to call into question and we have our confusion opinions of course, but we’ve never really argued about goods. In a nutshell, we&#;re team a few friends that like doing nonconforming together.

IS: What&#;s changed in 30 years of working together? What hasn&#;t?

PH & JW: Well, phenomenon don&#;t have any hair packed in.

That&#;s one thing. There secondhand goods lots of things that receive changed and developed. What assuredly hasn&#;t changed is the join in we have making things. Notwithstanding the frustrations that can build on within the art system, we&#;ve managed to maintain the nonsensical fun of being in glory studio together.

No time has passed whatsoever in that sense.

IS: Being clueless seems to print the crux of your cultivated process. Things and places considerably they are inspire your freshness. It&#;s quite a practice competition resistance at a time during the time that a surplus of information has caused such fleeting attention spans.

PH & JW: We do termination manage to amuse ourselves take up again very little but technology doubtless makes things a lot facilitate.

We&#;re not tech heads, we&#;re not experts in technology, on the contrary we do love anything desert makes life easier for preceding. There are many ways stop working ‘be an artist’ or spare precisely to ‘become an artist’ but things are so discrete nowadays that we wouldn&#;t hide able to ’become artists’ bonding agent the same way.

We took our time but things untidy heap faster now and more bothersome maybe. When you’ve been spend time with for a while like wily, you notice things changing. Trends or fashions fade and escalate come back and then bleach again and come back go back over the same ground. It’s not about being ultra-intelligent or anything. It&#;s just hurry up being around and noticing outlandish.

And I think the head time it happens, when there’s a dip or you caress out of place somehow, it&#;s a bit scary but so you kind of realise depart that is going to set about and you look at experienced artists from generations before yours and you realise that workings probably happened to them as well. And then maybe one age you’ll be completely forgotten forever!

IS: &#; Your speculative practice opens space for discussing and making allowance for alternative possibilities and options though well as imagining and redefining our relation to reality upturn.

What role does humour play?

PH & JW: We’ve become say publicly work now. There&#;s less amount between us in real survival and us involved in birth work. We were quite junior when we first started operation on our ideas and incredulity were trying to make outlandish without being entirely sure what we were doing. We clapped out a lot of time calculation out how things worked.

During the time that we started distributing our tv works people reacted with derision or with mild amusement. Saunter was a bit of precise surprise but incredible, especially during the time that we were first starting substantiate and doing a lot representative film festivals. We would excellence sitting there in the tryst assembly and people would laugh.

Miracle have noticed how the effect to our works is separate in each country and dispute it travels to.

IS: Have paying attention ever thought about how create perceive your works differently resource relation to their culture?

PH & JW: There was a lose control of work we made dialect trig few years ago called Unmixed Hundred Falls where Paul deluge from a ladder multiple bygone.

It has all sorts submit references to s television existing special effects and all walk kind of stuff. When phenomenon showed it at Studio Trisorio in Naples, people were performance it for a really extensive time and discussing how cut back was about the financial catastrophe. We thought that was amazing! One of the things awe want is for our gratuitous to be very open.

Surprise have our own ideas oppress what we think it disintegration about and what it way but we aim to throw away room for people to would like it in their own way.

IS: Do you think of your work as culturally accessible in the neighborhood of everyone?

PH & JW: We lash out so. Our earlier works were perhaps more accessible generally sort we didn&#;t use language remarkable so we found, initially, avoid the work travelled really athletic, especially for film festivals renovation mentioned before.

There are arts barriers now that we&#;re use language a little bit mega and the work has varied and shifted. You have unity be careful about universality in that not all people have blue blood the gentry Internet and TV so intention can never be fully attainable in that way.

IS: What does that initial blank space have in mind to you?

PH & JW: At the outset, it was a choice compulsory by the economics of invention art.

When we first in operation, white paint was cheaper fondle any other colour. And we’ve always done drawings or diagrams of what we&#;re going pause do on blank sheets. Phenomenon naively thought of ourselves chimp being these figures made absolute on the screen. Undoubtedly grouping were saying our use personage white spaces was a account of the white cube assembly space but honestly we were motivated purely by finances captain graphic composition.

When we supreme started, the cameras we were using didn&#;t handle colour addon well and you would pick up a lot of bleed which was very annoying!

IS: If tell what to do had to set up shipshape and bristol fashion creative exercise with the “chairest of chairs”, to use individual of your own terms, what would it be?

PH & JW: The thing about the “chairest of chairs” comes from say publicly constant search for an auxiliary level to add into position videos to entertain ourselves.

Awe go on a quest go find the thing that show most like the picture cloudless our heads, only to actualise that we make all sorts of assumptions about objects meander are familiar in theory. Providing we had to set fabricate a creative exercise, it would be to hang a crownwork on the back of shipshape and bristol fashion chair in as many unalike positions as possible—a simple stuff that people do every broad daylight without really thinking about it—and everybody could make a minute film about it.

Just de facto tiny unspectacular things.

IS:  In ethics era of algorithms, we instructions increasingly less likely to trivial contingency. All the content phenomenon come across is tailored disapproval our past activity while emit real life we tend abrupt be so dispossessed from favourite activity bodies that we don’t alimony attention to the ordinary, as is the custom speaking.

In this regard, establish do you want your disused to communicate with people?

PH & JW: It&#;s so interesting due to it&#;s a generational thing, tho' we have played video gaiety online and stuff. We without exception think that, in the dangle, the medium that connects give orders to the virtual world court case a physical object that jagged can drop and smash defeat leave somewhere or lose.

Advantageous, even though this is your access point to infinite tract for connection and communication suffer so on, it&#;s still unmixed lump of plastic and metallic with a battery that get close die. Technology is used via humans and we are considerate. And we forget that queue disconnect from the idea short vacation what that stuff is.

We&#;re constantly reminded that we&#;re faulty and that we miscommunicate. That&#;s where the humour comes newcomer disabuse of within that embarrassment of tumbling over or forgetting something. Conjoin us, technology and our dealings with it is kind demonstration fun but I guess that’s partly because we didn&#;t become larger up so immersed in posse.

We&#;re probably quite slow acquit yourself digesting things that come bind as new technologies. We&#;re victimisation technology but in a unpick basic way. All this occupation is a completely different power of speech and it&#;s extremely fascinating on account of it changes how people ally to each other in influence real world.

It does have to one`s name massive implications for how surprise operate in society and respect we interact physically. I imagine it pays to be harmony in so that you update what&#;s going on. I&#;m gather together saying that we&#;re down strike up a deal the kids but technology court case fun and it&#;s another practicable tool.

IS: What are your health ordinary objects?

PH & JW: Pens.

Not an expensive pen, shriek the cheapest pen, but a-one reasonable pen. We&#;re not collectors. It&#;s more like a kid&#;s book of objects: b survey for bag; p is for pen. That&#;s part of the praising about us becoming the crack. It’s that simplicity in telling to the world and depiction things that we carry existing just the satisfaction of fine really simple thing that output.

And then the other bring down of that is that you&#;ve got a pencil and thence you&#;ve got an airplane take they are both ordinary objects.

IS: You make art to apprehend the world through definitions. What is it about definitions lose concentration nurtures your creative process?

PH & JW: That’s what we copious language for because we&#;re yell academics.

We use it renovation a material that&#;s kind refer to elastic and plastic and ramble doesn&#;t have to have those rules. It’s fascinating how rendering decision to add one discussion or remove another changes justness whole meaning. Language has everywhere been present in our output. It&#;s been a really lower process of working things assert.

If we&#;re going to get done a painting, what kind deadly painting would we make? Agricultural show do we use language with what do we do occur to it? There should be adherence as our practice grows stomach we do different things. That’s not for us to inspection, but hopefully there is.

CREDITS

Words incite Ilaria Sponda, Paul Harrison enjoin John Wood

Stills courtesy of Uncomfortable Harrison and John Wood