Mark Titchner is an English artist, and 2006 nominee for the Turner Prize. He lives and works in London.
Whilst showing us around Mark Titchner also showed us what he is working on at the moment and explained why he is encouraging people to scream into a speaker during his new show.
MT: My name is Mark Titchner and we’re in my studio which is in East London. The studio tends to have a lot of different uses, sometimes working at the computer in kind of quite a clean kind of way and other times filthy with the cement mixer running casting concrete blocks or something.
My first experience of doing an exhibition with the Tate was a show in 2003, I did for the Art now space which I’ve just recently remade actually for the show also which is a piece called ‘Be angry but then stop breathing’. It’s an installation where the audience are invited to scream into this kind of echo chamber which would then pass the sound through speakers and vibrate liquid in the speaker cone so it’s a of moving drawing created by the sound of the screams of the visitors at the Tate. This is where I spend quite a lot of my time, I have the computer here, big format printer, so a lot of preparatory work gets done here and anything digital or anything film based is normally happening here. I have a lot of things around me as reference material, books and periodicals and records and CD’s and just sort of stuff.
One thing I have been looking a lot at recently is I’d bought a whole collection of magazines, this is a publication from the seventies called Man, Myth and Magic and I’ve been spending quite a lot of time going through, there’s about one hundred and twelve issues of this, rather beautiful seventies kind of layouts and photography. Recently bought a tape deck, I’ve been kind of excitedly buying tapes on the internet. This is the new horseback record which is really good. There is no real order to anything. It’s nice to just discover things amongst things you are already familiar with but might not have looked at for a long time.
This is Annabelle who brings me ginger beer. One of things that I have been working on is a series of works which are wood carvings which are then finished by burning them, by setting them on fire. Annabelle is my assistant and this is what she is working on at the moment.
A: I think it will probably start with just the outlines of the letters and then if Mark wants any more on it, we’ll do more. You never know it could end up being completely gold like that one.
MT: This is kind of the other end of the studio so relatively clean to kind of really messy from a proud position at the end of a cement mixer. I kind of periodically make these works using concrete and it absolutely kind of destroys the whole area, it’s absolutely disgusting. I quite like to keep bits of fragments of works. This is bits of steel leftover from kind of large metal reliefs. And then again these piles of paintings which I tend to carry around with the idea that I’m going to do something with them at some point and then they just sit around getting dusty. I haven’t actually been doing it so much but I did go for a period of doing a lot of casting of parts so you’ll find lying around the studio things like this which are bags of cast of pig’s ribs. I think there is a cast of a jawbone of a donkey, I have bags and bags and these are casts of printing blocks of texts. This is quite an interesting bag of casts of fingers. I have been here for about five years and I think it’s definitely a good few years of accumulated stuff. You’re making me feel like I need to have a clear up.
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