Parallel Lives: Conrad Shawcross RA

Conrad Shawcross: “I came across sound locators and kind of sound mirrors maybe 20 years ago and I was really sort of, really struck by them as a sort of these really intriguing complex objects, but I guess I was, I liked the sort of element of failure about them, the element of folly and the, the fact they were very rationally built and have this really rational intent and then this language of the machine, yet they had this very romantic, this surreal or this quite metaphysical element to them and they sort of had this, I guess, when I came across it was after much after lots of cultural events like the 60s, obviously, and things where, where they've been appropriated in these really interesting ways by The Beatles in like Sergeant Pepper, and they feel almost like an inverse of a gun in that they're not, there are these, they feel like these very trackable objects which are about pointing at specific things, so they move around an arc like a gun would on a turret but they, but yet instead of causing kind of ripple damage, they seem to be the reverse of that, where they're receiving information.

So they've got this sense of a receptor. Obviously, they're receptor rather than a, rather than a, a transmitter. So, they there is that. So, this is inversal, which sort of feels very sort of like almost like a pacifist statement. There is this fascination with, with the equipment of the past and but with all of these other objects, there's this, there is this sort of sombre, sinister element to it where these things actually are these, they’re weapons of war and they’re weapons of obstruction, and the sort of, and the violence and the, and the anguish and the terror that exists around these things is kind of palpable and should never be forgotten.

I suppose with these ones there is this sort of wonderful escapist element to them that they feel like they're, well they almost could be looking for phantasmagoria or like a ghosts or, or the soul, or they're they got this wonderful thing that they're trying to see the invisible. And they're trying to detect something that, that they that cannot be seen.

So there's this sort of romance to them that I think is really, really beautiful. And I used that in a series of works. I mean, I haven't returned to this subject for a while, but we made a, a piece in 2007, 2006 in Walsall. There was part of a show I did up there, it was a big space trumpet, and it took the, all the technology of, of these early sound locators but also with the sound locators weren't completely redundant and they did lead on to acoustic telescopes. So, I was given this opportunity to make this suspended piece in in Unilever House, which is just on Blackfriars Bridge. And it was my first permanent commission, so I was really sort of took on it with, like, really sort of tried to make the most ambitious piece I could. And it's all made of oak, but it, it's suspended from the ceiling, but at midday it moves on two axes to a new position. And there are these huge trumpets on it, which are bent, made of curved, bent plywood that are all stitched together at the side. So it looks like a, almost like an old polyphon record player. But they're but they're sort of 7 metres long and four metres wide, each one and the whole thing is 9 metres by 9 metres by 9 metres, a vast thing and it silently rotates to new positions and there's a spiral staircase in the ceiling that you could in theory sort of walk down to this thing, so it's got this sense of being designed around the body and it has this, I mean, it's quite whimsical and it's made of all made of wood and it’s quite romantic, and it's a material I've moved away from because I wanted actually things to feel more real and less sort of theatrical. 

But it was, but nonetheless, it still has this sense that someone could enter into it and operate it. I quite enjoy showing artworks that look like machines outside of an art world contexts and so, and I think there's a really different engagement when people see an object which has a clear function, but that function is yet to be deciphered. 

There is a real sort of energy and a sort of archaeological intent to try and work out the function from that form, whereas I guess when you see an artwork there's often a sort of almost a laziness in that you don't need to understand it, because it's just an artwork. 

I guess in terms of the way that this piece is seen, I mean, it is for me it's sort of almost really exciting; the idea that you would you put this somewhere in a, in a junk shop in Brighton or something and put it in the corner and no one knows what it is and that and the level of intrigue around deciphering what it is probably much higher than in a museum where you walk past it and you kind of, I mean, I don't know, almost it doesn't, it doesn't have the same level of kind of, kind of excitement in some ways of when you have that passionate, that archaeological decipherment of an object. I make machines very rationally and try and make them as, as, sort of elegantly and as well designed as possible, so they're not whimsical or kind of Heath Robinson, but then they have this, so they, they kind of force a kind of, that, that kind of process of analysis, but then they make things even well, they might make things too much, much slower than a person can do and so they, they end up being very problematic. 

Because they sort of, they have all this complexity and costs and expense in making them, but yet they sort of defy any logical explanation. But in terms of the changing meaning of an object, that's another thing so interesting in that every decade, that piece will take on a new resonance as we grow older and new generations emerge and technology changes that the objects remain static, but yet they change so incredibly over time. So, there's this, there's this paradox where an object is the same, but yet it's changing. Whereas we are growing old and we're ageing, but yet we somehow remain more similar than the objects which so status paradoxically, is much more kind of in flux than their own bodies, which are changing.”