Toby Paterson

Toby Pater­son won the Becks Futures prize for his paint­ings and sculp­tures, which are informed by Mod­ernist Architecture.

I think I should start by asking about the per­ma­nent work you’re doing for the show at the CCA. It sounds interesting…

There’s a few things like that coming up that I’m doing. It’s some­thing that I thought of right at the begin­ning of the process, as some­thing it would be quite nice to do. It’s going to be very low key, hidden away in a corner on the top level of the CCA. It’s going to be quite a simple thing. It relates to var­i­ous things I’ve been look­ing at over the last couple of years, not least the big wall paint­ing I did at the ICA last year. It’s essen­tially taking dec­o­ra­tive, or appar­ently dec­o­ra­tive, facade treat­ments from build­ings and turn­ing them… specif­i­cally ones designed by Berthold Lebetkin, who’s best known for the Pen­guin Pool at London Zoo. For exam­ple, the one that I used at the ICA, I was inter­ested in the way it was a hybrid , orig­i­nally coming from dec­o­ra­tive designs that he remem­bered from his child­hood in Russia, Cau­casian rugs and things like that, so you had that cul­tural and his­tor­i­cal dimen­sion there, and that was then trans­lated through his inter­est in archi­tec­ture as a tool of social renewal, and invested with a lot of ideas of con­tem­po­rary art at the time, then man­i­fests itself as this quite strik­ing facade treat­ment on a build­ing. At the time it was crit­i­cised as being too friv­o­lous, and is now the sort of thing that is crit­i­cised for being banal, in terms of archi­tec­ture, but actu­ally has this rich his­tory behind it. So I’m look­ing at these kind of s and turn­ing them back into abstracts, taking into account that his­tory, but kind of hiding it and turn­ing it into some­thing quite del­i­cate again. Oh God, sorry – I just had to write a thing about it just then, for more money, so my head is full of shite about it!

I’m not sure yet which spe­cific build­ing I’m going to work with, and there are other people I’m look­ing at, people like Irwin Goldfin­ger as well, stuff that Victor Pass­more did at a New Town called Peter­lee in the North East of Eng­land. The form that they’re going to take uses these inter­est­ing sort of light­wells up in the top space in the CCA, and I’ve taken a bit of a Le Cor­busier cue from this build­ing called La Tourette, which is a monastery he built, and there are these little chapels there that are lit with nat­ural light, but dif­fused down these tubes, so you get this very nice dif­fused nat­ural light in these small spaces, and he painted colour inside the tubes. So, that was where the ini­tial idea came from. It’s going to be quite unusual in that space which is so mono­chro­matic, there are going to be these intense spots of bright colour, with more detailed areas worked up in the manner I’ve been talk­ing about.

Given that your work is so informed by archi­tec­ture, is it inter­est­ing to be having a more direct impact on a build­ing, rather than putting work in a gallery?

Yeah. It’s funny, the works are never really site-​specific, to use that hoary old term. Obvi­ously what­ever you do, whether it’s in a gallery space or a public work or what­ever, you have to take account of your sur­round­ings. But you’re right, this is inter­est­ing for me, because it’s a response to some­thing I came across in that build­ing. It’s not actu­ally a build­ing I like that much, so what­ever good little bits I find in it, it’s nice to work with them.

So you’re high­light­ing the places in the CCA you’ve responded to?

Yeah. The other side of the coin is a piece for the tem­po­rary exhi­bi­tion — I was just up in Mary­hill watch­ing it being con­structed — which is going to be in CCA1, the foyer space. This piece is a response to that space. What I’m doing is build­ing this sort of mas­sive sculp­tural wall thing right the way through the middle of the space, and that was a response to my feel­ings about that space, an attempt to acti­vate it in some way, and also to pro­vide some­thing to pre­vent the CCA look­ing like an empty shop window from the street. That’s some­thing that Belinda Goody did really well with her project a couple of months ago.

As for the rest of the show, is it mostly new work or…?

It’s all new.

Good­ness me!

Yeah, I’m feel­ing pretty wiped out at the moment. I’m not sure what the final count is going to be. I’m going in there to install on Monday, and I’m doing three wall paint­ings in there, and some­where between twenty and thirty works going in there as well, all from the past year.

Right. Is there any­thing in there that will sur­prise people? Any new strands coming through?

Well, there’s a water­colour paint­ing in there!

That’s cer­tainly new!

That’s kind of a fun thing. It’s funny, I think the new strands will come out once this show is up. Things are chang­ing quite a lot, when it comes to the work, because I’ve had an inten­sive period of doing things, and not had as much time as I would like to actu­ally keep push­ing things for­ward. Not that I feel like I’m tread­ing water, but it feels like this is going to be a cut off point for things that i feel i’ve dealt with and I can then move off in a couple of new directions.

In terms of what’s hap­pen­ing with the rest of the show, CCA2 is going to be really shut down and dark and muse­umy. I’ve low­ered the ceil­ing fur­ther, so it’s going to be quite claus­tro­pho­bic. In there I’m show­ing works relat­ing to the Glas­gow archi­tects Gille­spie, Kidd & Coia, who are best known for the sem­i­nary down at Cardross. It’s the jewel in the crown of Scot­tish Mod­ernism, allegedly, and it’s now com­pletely derelict. They were work­ing between the mid-50s and the mid-70s, and I’ve been work­ing with their archive at the Mack­in­tosh School of Art, and the sit­u­a­tion with them is that they mainly built churches and schools, for the Catholic Church, and loads and loads of their build­ings have been demol­ished, or unsym­pa­thet­i­cally altered, or left to rot. It’s quite an incred­i­ble sit­u­a­tion, in that they’re Scotland’s most inno­v­a­tive archi­tects, of their time, and now their build­ings have been bru­talised. In a way, I’m pre­sent­ing quite straight-​up s that I work with a lot, these things that fall between the draw­ing board and real­ity, so I’m re-​presenting, as it were, s of these build­ings that are no longer there, or are derelict.

Then in CCA3, I’m doing a big chaotic abstract wall paint­ing that stretches all the way around the space, with lots of other stuff dotted around it. I don’t know if you saw that CMYK show at Tramway last year?

Yep.

It’s kind of like the piece I had in that, these big sort of assem­blage things. These big awk­ward slightly lumpen things. That kind of treat­ment, but using the whole space. The work relates to two dif­fer­ent sites, one of which still exists, one which doesn’t, one being the Fes­ti­val of Britain site on the South Bank, from the 1951 fes­ti­val, and the other being this incred­i­ble place in Sile­sia in Poland, which is a park of recre­ation and cul­ture that’s still there but semi-​derelict. Both are sort of odd utopian pro­pa­ganda exer­cises, and what I’m doing is sort of jam­ming the two together to make a hybrid fes­ti­val park, a sort of man­i­fes­ta­tion of cul­ture through architecture… that sort of idea.

This is your biggest show to date, yeah? How is it deal­ing with a big solo thing like this. You’ve said how much work it is, but… how do you feel about it?

It’s weird, because it’s in my home city. I’ve done solo things , but they’ve been smaller, pro­jecty things. It sort of fluc­tu­ates between sort of vague con­fi­dence and blind terror. Because I’ve been trying to get so many indi­vid­ual pieces of work done, it’s been a bit of a head­long rush and I don’t have any­thing of a life. I feel quite weird now, just being in the house. It is excit­ing, and it’s def­i­nitely the show I’ve been most ner­vous about — I don’t nor­mally get ner­vous about these things — it’s going to be a bit weird. I don’t know how people are going to take it. The CCA is a bit of a con­tentious place, and my deci­sion to do this show wasn’t taken lightly. I really want to do some­thing good there. There’s a lot of pres­sure is what I’m trying to say.

Isn’t pres­sure sort of semi-​permanent after the Beck’s thing? Did that lump quite a lot of pres­sure on you?

I don’t know. There are nice things crop­ping up now. I was talk­ing to Roddy Buchan­nan about this, and said that noth­ing will change at first, and that I’d get a flood of annoy­ing triv­ial things imme­di­ately, but then in a year or so things will start hap­pen­ing that make you think, ‘Oh, this is because of the Becks.’ That’s start­ing to happen, and in a really nice way. It’s less exhi­bi­tion ori­en­tated, less people trying to get you into group shows. There are a couple of things like that coming up. There’s a piece from the Becks show, a small per­spex paint­ing of a pri­mary school designed by Dennis Lasden, and they’ve asked me to work out a per­ma­nent piece of work to be made along with the edu­ca­tion depart­ment of that school. That’s a really incred­i­ble thing for me, to have been work­ing with a build­ing that I was intrigued by, then a year later I’m being asked to make a thing there. This is really the way I’d like things to go. As you were saying ear­lier, relat­ing directly to a build­ing is def­i­nitely interesting.

The main thing like that that you’ve done was the Roys­ton Road thing?

Yeah, that was a really strange thing, because it came to me early on. I think that led on to other public things. Now things are get­ting more inter­est­ing, because there’s more of an over­lap with my usual studio-​based practice.

It kind of strikes me, look­ing at what you do from the out­side, that this is a sort of nat­ural direc­tion for you to be taking, given the nature of your studio work.

Absolutely. If these projects come off, I’ll be really lucky. If you make work like mine, it’s very hard to trans­late that beyond gallery spaces. I’ll be pinch­ing myself when these things are up and running.

Posted at 6pm on 01/04/03 by Jack Mottram to the art, interviews category.
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