Jonathan Griffin

From Room to Room

Part of Ian Kiaer’s installation Endless House Project: Ulchiro Endnote / Pink (2008) consists of a paper and matchstick construction small enough to fit in the palm of your hand. It resembles a building of some kind; if not a conventional house then perhaps a shop or a commercial premises, with an upper level that juts out over the ground. Most of its walls are created from rectangular images, each one a cell cut from a Manga comic strip, each one joined to its neighbour by way of scarified globs and hairy tendrils of glue, dispensed, it appears, via a hot-melt glue gun.

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New Romantic

Paris-born, Berlin-based artist Cyprien Gaillard could be described as an archaeologist of recent history. In his films, photographs, collages, sculptures and performances, the Sublime sits alongside the profane, and brutality is underscored by moments of quiet beauty.

Jonathan Griffin: Where is wilderness today and how do you value it?

Cyprien Gaillard: My father was a fly fisherman. He would take me on trips to a river in Oregon, and I would spend my time looking for a parking lot or road so I could skateboard. I think my early relationship to architecture was informed by that.

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Through the Looking Glass

Pietro Roccasalva says he doesn’t believe in chronologies, at least not where his work is concerned; every image or idea that arises is the reflection of another that came just before it or a premonition of one to follow. He likes to think of his oeuvre as ready-formed – a magnificent hall of mirrors.

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Tales of Everyday Madness

I worried for weeks about where to meet Eric Bainbridge. I envisaged talking to him in surroundings that are significant for him and his work, somewhere that might lead our conversation in unexpected but fruitful directions. Should I travel up to Hartlepool, the town in the north-east shoulder of England near where he was raised, and where he now lives for part of the week in a cottage by the sea? Or would it be better to visit the art school in nearby Sunderland, where he has taught for the past nine years, and where his office currently doubles as a studio, allowing cups of tea and tangerines to drift into his sculptural combinations? When this became too complicated to arrange, I considered something closer to home: a trawl through London’s second hand shops, where I imagine he finds much of his raw material, or a trip to an out of town D.I.Y. store (it turns out that Greg Hilty already had this idea for an essay he wrote on Bainbridge’s work in 1990).1 Perhaps a market would be appropriate, or, given his interest in the global circulation of goods, a spot out on the Thames estuary where we could watch cargo ships dock and unstack their coloured metal containers. Read the rest of this entry »

A tour across the aesthetic landscape of Matthew Monahan’s figurative sculptures, prints and drawings would make stops in the caves of Lascaux, at archaeological digs in peat bogs, sealed tombs of ancient Egypt and Babylon, Easter Island and the temples of Greek and Roman antiquity – not to mention contemporary Japan, Amsterdam, China and Los Angeles. Read the rest of this entry »