August 2022

In conversation with James Fuller

Ahead of his solo presentation at Art-O-Rama in Marseille, with South Parade, the Athens based artist discusses recent work (debuting at the fair), his wider practice and the importance of collaboration. The conversation is with Isaac Simon (IS), founder of South Parade.

IS: Following your time at the Royal College of London you made the decision to move with your partner, the artist Anna Gonzalez Noguchi, to Athens from London. What were the motivations behind the move?

JF: I’d been living and working in London for a decade and wanted to try and find somewhere to work differently. More immediate access to industry and materials, good space, all the usual suspects. I should also mention Brexit because freedom of movement was seemingly due to end, and that necessitated instinctive decisions! It wouldn’t be possible for me to stay here more than 6 months of the year if I made the same steps now.

IS: Thinking about your studio specifically, you completely gutted it from an old two level store into a workshop focused studio. It can now facilitate metal work, wood work and other more intricate productions “expanding and contracting where necessary” as you would say.

JF: We’re based in a central neighbourhood just north of the centre of Athens in an old καφενείο (cafe) turned former wood workshop. Now if work allows, we’re in the studio everyday. We can go and buy metal in the port in the morning, cut and weld same day and drop it off for plating or galvanising nearby the day after that. We have developed really nice collaborations here and relationships with suppliers and family businesses at all types of scales which helps us massively to produce—produce one offs, or prototypes, or experiments—go back to the studio and return 6 months or a year later with a work to complete. I find people here become readily invested in the works I’m passing through, even if I will be their smallest client and that’s often required if we have to fight for something without certainty of success together. I would say that I do a lot of work in a year but don’t necessarily make a lot of works in a year, or try to, but work in quite a cyclical way, where things return and circulate over a longer duration.

IS: I really like how your proximity to industry impacts the work. Undoubtedly, the practice would operate very differently in London now for example. Why are these collaborations important?

JF: My objects flow through all the same supply chains and manufacturing spaces in the city as other well established objects, church paraphernalia, bbq grills, museum replicas, soaps, heavy machine parts, mattress manufacturing, yacht upholstery, tyre recycling etc etc. But they don’t stay in lane and it’s important to me that they are able to interact at some stage in these wider economies outside of the studio, and with people involved.

It’s important to emphasise the personal responsibility towards the use of technology, the use of craft and the collaboration of these sites of industrial production. That the three can be woven together like a self tightening stitch until they lock into self supporting works. It’s something to be explored, not something to be fed to you blind.

IS: Your practice often combines and explores the relationship between traditional craft and advanced industrial techniques - what are the main ideas and concerns?

JF: Over the last few years I’ve been trying to produce sculptures that tread an ambiguous line between digital production and haptic processes—the hand-made—physical information transfer. I’m not some kind of chisel wielding purist, CAD software, CNC, laser and other production technologies are essential to my work, but I’m also heavily involved in physical processes of material manipulation. Speculative works that could seem to have grown physically from the screen, rooted instead in a very real process of peeling and unrolling from real-world surfaces. Through different liquid and solid states, different opportunities for manipulation where the digital forms exist more as simple geometries, and maps. Defining the edges of the canvas not the content.

The rotationally moulded objects are an example of this, maybe we’ll talk more about that, where real world surfaces are manually stitched together from flat planes towards non-human volumes in the same way you’d make a pair of pants, being transferred between waxes and silicones and other gummy intermediary steps, before a final choreography of the material rolling around the surface of the moulds. And that’s the first time the work is visualised. Works with complex joins between different surfaces, or continuous texts in relief.

Not to go straight from the screen, or a scan and through a nozzle and into the world. It may be deemed to be the most technologically advanced mode for production, but negates a different type of intelligence. And as is becoming more apparent, acknowledging different types (or definitions) of intelligence and networks are going to be essential to sustain our own.

I can also love this work though, from artists, manipulating and fabricating in a purely digital workflow, or existing only through technological interfaces but it isn’t my focus right now—although I do make exceptions.

IS: I find the material choices you make provocative, there is an underlying presence of the body - implied, suggested, never literal, or that is my reading. These materials permeate our lives yet exist somehow still on the periphery of our cognitive engagement— tyre chippings, synthetic leather, functional seating, mattress wadding or denim (which also has fashion and labour connotations). Ηοw do these materials end up in your work?

JF: I prefer it when choices happen slowly. Often there is some kind of lineage involved. The fabric panels for instance we are presenting at A-O-R, started from needing just the right level of pinch under compression for the ultra thin zinc works I made previously (Perfect Living, 2020). So you explore all the different options, industrial felts, gaskets, foams, and in the end the best affordable material was found nearby in a small place that makes spring mattresses—to quell the sensation of the springs pressing into your back—perfect—with it’s recycled mixed fibres, fleeting colour and rigidity. It later became a pressed text work in our previous show together, and now it’s fully taken on the role of canvas for these new works to soak in the drawings instead of the body liquids.

About the other part of your question, there’s a lot to say about that, on the one side you have this very natural coexistence with how I work and the type of raw materials that litter our lives and pamper our bodies and our spirits. I often find myself buying raw cosmetic grade products for instance, kaolin clays to mix into waxy compounds that a lot of my works pass through, raw earth pigments, waxes, lubricants. At the bottom end of ultra refined petroleum production and other raw mineral extraction lies the products and by-products we use to oil and hydrate and bind. These are sculptural materials.

On a more conceptual basis, there is the unseen presence bodies in my work, other lives—I use a lot of existing objects and repeat gestures from unknown people as catalysts for more work. Art making for me is still a very physical process that has physiological implications. But alongside that, a kind of disembodiment of those personal items—or tastes—or things, into autonomous objects, independent from me also. It’s a live issue.

IS: Moving towards your Art-O-Rama presentation, what was the starting point for these artworks? Tell us more about the work that you will present?

JF: I wanted to treat our presentation as a more experimental space to explore different parts of my work simultaneously. There will be the laser etched fabric panels with drawings slipped out of abandoned patents, new rotationally moulded rolling text works, some other hollow objects—plus some ultra thin eletroformed foil works that I’ve been wanting to make for a while but didn’t find the right way for them to come together until now.

IS: Let’s talk about rotational moulding, which has some well established niche commercial uses from making hollow chocolate eggs to thermoplastic hollow objects like water tanks and canoes. This method of production is another collaboration of sorts - a co-authorship between you and the materials. I like a phrase you have used previously, how you “set the conditions for success or failure”. There are certain aspects in and around the studio that are out of your control?

JF: It’s become a really useful collaborator actually. For example—if you need a saw to make a cut, it performs that role in relation to how well you set it up, align your marking as well as how well it was designed and other performance related parameters—and if you don’t want to lose a finger you don’t try to use it to perform other roles.

I built the rotomoulder to create situations in the studio that require a whole choreography to unfold in order to produce hollow and fragile works in a kind of singular moment. And depending on the environmental conditions in the studio, the peculiarities of the mould, the limitations of the material and the operator (me), works come out differently and it’s all in the work. In the surface and in the guts. So part of that choreography is set, reproducible, but part of it is still very much alive. In control and out of control. The works I’ve been making from flexible, stitched, bag-like moulds (cast in wax composites) to the current multi-part hard shelled moulds, dictate their own situation in a way. I like the rough edges, the complicated forms that swell and sag under their own weight at some point. Sucking out all of the tension from the silicone skins and using it for their own construction into something autonomous.

But true to their nature they remain thin skinned with no correct orientation or hierarchy between faces.

IS: This idea of having a sculpture with no set orientation is interesting - there is no right or wrong way of positioning it. This perhaps also speaks to an inherent awareness of the viewer in your work. The sculptures encourage circumvention, certain works are not always accessible depending on where the viewer is positioned or the changing light.

JF: I find it a good leveller, allowing you to let go of control, not dictating or prescribing your perspective for the work once completed. Whilst they are still in my possession and I do have to decide on their positioning, I tend to work on lightweight, modular furniture and other constructions that serve as a kind of hybrid surface between a more formal display setting and a rougher studio context—to extend that conversation. For Art-O-Rama there are two new tables that pop and clip together temporarily like tent-poles for the sculptures to be placed on.

IS: Coming on to the fabric panels that you will be showing, the handling of the abandoned patent drawings reminds me of your previous use of found embroidery instructions. How do you use these found objects?

JF: Yeah you’re right to link the embroidery instructions and the abandoned patent drawings. I think about them in the same way, as instructions and diagrams to be translated, or mistranslated and manipulated. As newly open source documents, or images with a very small amount of information but still with composition and feeling and purpose.

The patents are a little different in that they become abandoned at any point that the patentee fails to keep up their maintenance payments to keep it protected. After which point they get deemed Abandoned. Many of the drawings I’ve been working with and extracting out, even of an axe or a slingshot, are from say 2015, not 1975. They’re mostly contemporary documents and that comes with their own politics and context.

IS: You mentioned at some point in our earlier discussions about the drawings of Robert Morris entitled In the Realm of the Carceral?

Yeah, they’re these really beautiful drawings of prison architectures, geometries of confinements, walls, fences, very abrasive and oppressive material from 1978 and I felt a closeness with how they had been cropped, and handled. I’d never come across these works before until they were shown quite recently in New York. Generally, I thought I knew Morris’s work and writing but they felt really fresh and relevant. I’m sure they are somewhere in the psyche of these works.

IS: The lead up to Art-O-Rama has been an intense period of production, why is this important to you?

JF: I like to work with intensity even if it doesn’t always feel OK. There are chunks of time when I’m not actively producing finished works and the tempo of the work is different but the hours are roughly the same. These intense production periods become very personal I guess—risks are more easily taken and that gets reflected in the work.

IS: One thing that has struck me from the very beginning of working together is the way you use titles in your work and how they can extend or confuse meaning - Perfect Living, A finger tracing the lines of a thumb, Soft Furnishings, Sealed from the inside. Expand on the role of writing in your practice?

JF: I find titles useful in general, they help frame my thinking around the work and often come at different points organically in the notes that I make alongside the objects. Sealed from the Inside was the first work I made for the fair and so everything else followed from there.

It’s true, as you know, that I like to make a lot of notes while I’m developing work. It holds a kind of coercive influence over the physical works to come, sometimes explicitly including some of the text itself. I use the notes to keep things close at hand, accessible, to stay with the work. Sometimes I share them after in some format, or as we have done before, make them accessible to you for example before a show so they can work their way out.

Working with text more directly as relief and in the surfaces rather than in their shadow is still a very new development that I’m processing.

IS: What are your plans for the future?

JF: I have a rather large labour debt to pay off to Anna Gonzalez Noguchi over the short term for her help in this last busy period. Otherwise, of course—work more, fly less and open up with more collaborative projects.

IS: Tell us something we might not know about the practice?

JF: Not being able to draw keeps you firmly in imposter mode.