Craig Wood

Interview by Liam Gillick

from Audio Arts Volume 14, Number 2, 1994

Transcript

Liam Gillick: I’m in Leeds City Arts Gallery with Craig Wood. Would you tell me a bit about this piece Craig?

Craig Wood: Well this work derives from a whole series of drawings on paper and on plastics using a dot technique with ink which itself came from archaeology. It’s supposed to be a neutral style so that you don’t have thousands of archive drawings in people’s different expressive styles; it’s a quasi-neutral style, of course. From these paper drawings, which were of disposable plastic objects, plastic milk bottles, things with about a one second attention span in our culture. I draw these things really laboriously and in a one-off format in an archive drawing. And these that we’re looking at now are the codes on the base of a bottle of ammonia that I found in Germany. I’ve shown three of these elements separately; the whole ensemble. I don’t actually know what anything means, it’s like a language that I’m not privy to. It’s like a language which we don’t ever ask about, which is incredible because it’s ubiquitous. It’s on everything but it’s just none of our business.

LG: I’m quite curious about them in relation to other work that you’ve done because they also have a kind of sympathy to a place, like it’s one thing you can do to a wall. You have to be careful where you tread. Is that something that you’re conscious of or is just a by-product do you think, of what you’re doing?

CW: No, I think that’s very true. There’s definitely, with the floor pieces, something inviting you in a way, but also something completely denying you. I mean the floor pieces invite a tactile contact and they’re very alluring but you can’t actually get to grips with them because you’ll destroy them. It’s like a kind of present that you can’t open. And there’s something to do with this as well, with the wall as there are also obvious connections on formal levels like it’s all mapping, it’s all drawing and archive and like you’d be mapping the floor, or archiving kind of trash as it were. It’s kind of mapping and making it something that’s very, very common, something that you stand on or something that you throw away, that’s damn common. And also this thing with the skin, it’s really weird that the whole panic about the water pieces was whether they would be burst. Were they going to break or is somebody going to stand on it. And in this whole thing here it’s just purely about breaking it. Treating that skin. It’s like my own reaction to the last work.

LG: Was this work first done in, in Germany?

CW: Yeah, I had a bit of stab at it last year in London but nothing much. It evolved really seriously last year at about the end of autumn’93 and this is about the fourth one I’ve done.

LG: Of all the artists in the show you’re the one I don’t immediately think of as someone working on the wall. In fact, the opposite, I think of your other work. How do you feel, working among this group of artists?

CW: In the end you begin to feel like kind a slave to architecture or context. Constantly having to respond and react to various situations that you don’t find particularly interesting, that will produce a response then isn’t really very interesting. It’s nice to have enough independence, even though it’s obviously a wall show with work put directly onto the wall, it’s still much more flexible than previous work.