Simon Periton

Simon Peri­ton makes doilies, big ones, that make much of the con­flict between con­fronta­tional sub­ject matter and the lacy, intri­cate nature of his meth­ods. We spoke to him about Mint Poi­soner, an exhi­bi­tion at Inver­leith House.

So, what’s going in the show?

I’m putting in six new pieces of work, essen­tially images that I took in Costa Rica when I was on hol­i­day—not that it’s par­tic­u­larly impor­tant where they are from—and they’re all organic, naturey, jungle rain forest, sort of dense canopies of foliage. They’re quite com­pli­cated layers of twines and vines. That’s not a very good descrip­tion, sorry. Essen­tially they’re very organic, unlike say the stuff that’s on at The Modern Insti­tute, which is harder and more urban.

Pre­sum­ably that’s in response to Inver­leith House being in the middle of a Botanic Garden?

Well, it sort of is and it sort of isn’t. Orig­i­nally the idea for the show was going to be that upstairs there were going to be these 17th and 18th Cen­tury draw­ings from the Fitzwilliam col­lec­tion in Cam­bridge, they were floral still life s, a whole mix­ture of stuff. I said that I’d do a whole suite of pieces in response to the draw­ings. For one reason or another, it was decided that the draw­ings weren’t going to be there, and I said, ‘Oh well that’s a bit weird, because I was going to make stuff in response to those drawings.’ At that time I was work­ing on some other stuff, for a show in New York, so I went off on my trip and when I was there I realised I could still work with roughly the same idea, so it does fit, but it’s not an attempt to make a show that fits the Botanic Gardens.

Right.

The show I did in New York was a bit darker, denser, using more floral William Morris type pat­terns, so in a way this feels like a car­ry­ing on of ideas I was work­ing on anyway.

So you don’t nor­mally work in response to the space you’re show­ing in?

No, I don’t really. Although there is a part of me that thought that the stuff I did for The Modern Insti­tute fit quite nicely with how I think of The Modern Insti­tute. It would be too corny, too straight­for­ward to make a show about nature and flora in the Botanic Gar­dens. I think the show will be a lot darker, a lot more sin­is­ter than I imag­ine the Gar­dens look­ing in early June. And I don’t think you could pos­si­bly ever outdo the Botanic Gar­dens! It’s such a fan­tas­tic place.

To talk more gen­er­ally, how did you light upon the doily method, if I can call it that?

It’s such a long time ago now, I never thought I’d be making these paper doily things for as long as I have. I’d sort of taken a year out, and decided not to show any­where, just to take some time in the studio work­ing on some little things, and one of the things I was inter­ested in doing—this is in ‘94 or ‘95—was trying to find a way of work­ing that was invested with a lot of effort and activ­ity, but was essen­tially a kind of use­less, highly dec­o­ra­tive act. I was trying all sorts of things, doing little draw­ings on sheets of rub­bishy card­board, making things out of odds and ends I had lying around. I sprayed through some things, and one of the things was a doily, and it fell on the floor, and after a while I found it, and looked at it and thought, ‘This is what I’m look­ing for, that’s what a doily is: a use­less and dec­o­ra­tive beau­ti­ful object.’ It’s only pur­pose is to live under­neath a cake and on top of a plate. Beau­ti­fully dec­o­ra­tive and totally useless.

So I started cut­ting things out of paper, a bit like those child­like snowflake things. I was trying to get back to some sort of inno­cent way of making art, rework­ing the ideas of why I wanted to be doing that sort of thing anyway. This was four, five years after leav­ing col­lege, and you have to sift through a lot of the non­sense you’ve been fed, that you want to get rid of. I was just making them with­out ever think­ing that I’d show them to any­body, they were a means to an end, to get to some­where else. Then some­one came by the studio and saw them, and said that I should put them in a show. The response I got was so extreme at the time—it seems a bit silly now—a lot of people really hated the idea that I would make a doily, they were really offended by that. There was all this talk of ‘Oh, you mean paper-​cuts, you don’t really mean doilies’ and I thought, ‘Well, no actu­ally, I do mean doilies’ partly because the response annoyed me so much. And it just went from there, and every time I think I won’t do any more, I come up with a new way of work­ing with them. They were quite direct and crude to start with, and always had this flu­o­res­cent paper thing going on, which was very direct, sort of saying, ‘You can’t pos­si­bly ignore this piece of flu­o­res­cent piece of paper in front of you.’ In a way, they’ve become more and more about the sur­face, about layers, about dec­o­ra­tion. They’ve grad­u­ally got more and more com­plex, and I’ve got more into three dimen­sions, hang­ing them like Christ­mas dec­o­ra­tions, or making things that slot together. What was a simple way of work­ing to start with in the end can pro­duce quite an elab­o­rate piece. The other thing about work­ing this way is that you never really know what you’re going to get until you open it up at the end. I used to fold the paper into four, and lit­er­ally didn’t know what I’d get. Now I do four layers to make a different… illu­sion. There’s some­thing quite naive and won­der­ful about that that I still like.

And of course they’re quite sophis­ti­cated at the same time, in terms of their complexity…

Yeah, in terms of phys­i­cal cut­ting they’ve got a lot more sophis­ti­cated, and obvi­ously I’m a lot better at cut­ting now than I was seven or eight years ago. In terms of the ideas of them, it’s become quite strange. In some ways they’re caught between paint­ing and sculp­ture. A lot of people regard them as some sort of com­ment about paint­ing, but I think that’s mainly because they hang on a wall in a paint­ing like fash­ion, and they become about the sur­face. On the other hand, if anyone asks me what I do, I tend to say that I’m more of a sculp­tor really. They’re not really two dimen­sional, they have, albeit a very small one, a third dimen­sion. They do have a sort of pres­ence that is more than a flat thing.

You just pre-​empted my next ques­tion. I did wonder about that – they’re very, very flat, but are obvi­ously sculp­tural, and the way you make them is recog­nis­ably an act of sculpture…

They hang on the wall, and even though they are very flat, they sag and tighten depend­ing what’s going on around them in terms of tem­per­a­ture and humid­ity. I’m look­ing at some hang­ing in the studio now, and if they’re made up of three or four layers of paper, they can end up three or four inches deep. That’s some­thing other than a flat sur­face, there is some­thing sculp­tural there. Not that I’m really both­ered about where they fit in. You know, they’re sort of like draw­ing as well.

Yeah, they sort of look kind of a bit like line draw­ings from a dis­tance. Sorry I’m being a bit vague here…

No, no, they do. But the thing about cut­ting with a knife is that it’s a very def­i­nite act. If you’re draw­ing with a pencil, you can make a mis­take and rub it out, but with a knife you’ve got such a def­i­nite mark-​making activ­ity. Obvi­ously I can and do make mis­takes, but they’re worked into the piece, I’ve never had to throw any­thing away. You can’t go back on your­self, you have to make cer­tain deci­sions, and that makes them look very graphic, very like line draw­ings. They always end up look­ing more frag­ile than that, though.

When it comes to the sub­ject matter, how does that relate to the process of making? Are you lim­ited by it, or does it sug­gest cer­tain sub­ject matter?

I don’t seem to be lim­ited by it. At first they were almost like doo­dles, I was just taking my scalpel for a walk, and they kind of lent them­selves to making these thorny tan­gles, and they looked like that for a while, and there was some­thing quite twee and amus­ing about doing such dainty floral work. The I tried to rework cer­tain ideas, and for a while there were lots of riot scenes or anar­chy sym­bols or barbed wire, in a way because of the del­i­cate and use­less prop­er­ties of the work, it lends itself to making a com­ment on what I though of those ways of being and work­ing. I sup­pose in a way, my very ini­tial ideas about find­ing some­thing del­i­cate and use­less as a way of work­ing were in response to ques­tions about whether you could find any way of work­ing that wasn’t a dec­o­ra­tive art object any more. Now, I go in and out of that, some­times they appear to look more hard in their imagery, or some­times things that appear to be dec­o­ra­tive and organic nat­ural s end up having a much more sin­is­ter feel them than if I’d done anar­chy signs and ter­ror­ists, do you see what I mean?

So there’s a built in oppo­si­tion between this frag­ile thing depict­ing a non-​fragile thing…

Yeah, that’s my kind of inten­tion, to see how that would work. Obvi­ously you don’t really know until things are fin­ished and on the wall, but that is in there. It becomes… With this show, I don’t really expect them to be life­like ren­di­tions of a jungle or a tree. I’ve chosen spe­cific things I was drawn to, whether it’s an odd root struc­ture, or a view into the rain forest with this multi-​layered, panoramic canopy. One of them is this four foot by five foot, really intense curled up leaf from some strange plant, which will look like an abstract blob, but with these strange fil­i­grees that ref­er­ence nature.

What have you got coming up after Inver­leith house?

I’ve been doing shows back to back since Octo­ber last year, so Inver­leith is the last one for a while. I’ve got a bit of a break, other than funny little projects and commissions.

And you’re stick­ing with the doilies for the time being?

Yeah, yeah I am. I’ve still got a lot of things I’d like to make. And I’ve just done a book, Sadie [Coles] and I have just done a book, with an essay by Will Bradley who used to be with The Modern Insti­tute, so it’s been a bit of a bonkers year already, so I’m look­ing for­ward to a break.

Cool. That should be plenty of stuff – it’s only a short pre­view I’m writ­ing, so I won’t take up any more of your time.

Sure. I’m just trying to think if there’s any­thing else to say.

They’re ter­ri­ble these things – it’s hard to know what to talk about with­out seeing the work up in the gallery.

I know, I know. One thing is that Mint Poi­soner is an ana­gram of my name.

Yeah.

I’ve been using ana­grams for the past few shows.

Uh-​huh. Was it Snip Riot Omen at The Modern Institute?

Yeah, and the show in New York was Pre­mo­ni­tion, which is quite a nice one, get­ting a whole word from my name, and kind of funny for my first New York show. If they fit, I like to use them. I don’t know if it’s worth mentioning.

I will I think – Mint Poi­soner has a really nice ring to it.

Yes, it does. I do quite like that one.

Posted at 10am on 16/05/03 by Jack Mottram to the art, interviews category.
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