After being in a photographic studio over the weekend watching “Sit Gena Rowlands” being expertly photographed by Donna Kempson (thanks Donna!), it struck me that one of the best things about being an artist is having imagination, which makes it impossible to be lonely or bored. I don’t get tired of looking at people or objects and trying to see the world from these alternative perspectives. What would it be like to be you? Or you? Or it? How would I feel if I was a book, a chair, a map, a rope?
Because my solo work is always indebted to people I admire (whether they are artists or not), I don’t even really see it as “solo” work: it’s a linked set of practices, a chain which starts with other people’s words, actions and deeds and stretches out across time and space in order to be translated into a different form by a different person. There isn’t another way of making work which makes sense to me.
As I’ve been thinking about collaboration in general for quite a while now, I want to call the aforementioned chain-like process “indirect collaboration”, but it might be more accurate to call it “tradition”… which makes it all the more curious that when it comes to presenting ourselves as artists “in our own right”, the more instantly recognisable the individual artist brand, the longer the chain of people behind it.
