Artist in residence - Alistair McClymont
I'm interested in a desire for elsewhere, a desire that is romantic and often concerned with the sublime. Living in an urban environment there is a need to transform the home or momentarily suspend reality. This can manifest itself in such things the decoration of homes or buying into product advertising.
At home people immerse themselves in an idiosyncratic world designed to stabilise their lives and remove them, albeit temporarily, from the outside reality. We often choose the products we use for the same reasons, there is usually some escapist or romantic suggestion in their advertising and form. What particularly excites me is a product that claims to change and improve the domestic environment and let you instantly achieve the sublime other world you crave. This is the reason for the recent focus on air fresheners and the chocolate bar Toblerone.
My work is a response to the human reinterpretation and adaptation of our environment. My parent's house is has been used in my artwork, it is a place where I have taken notice of every last detail in a domestic environment. This place allows me to take a serious and refined stance on the subject, but also allows humour into the work. I think we are usually aware of the folly of our attempts to create our own little nirvana, but this doesn't prevent us trying.
Categorising my work is often difficult as it can hover between sculpture, performance, video and photography; many pieces are photographic or video documentation of specifically sited events. For instance the Living Room series of interventions in my parent's house and the Abandoned Car series of clingfilm wrapping of found joy-ridden cars have both been represented as photographs rather than the original installations or objects.
My MA degree show at the Royal College of Art presented work involving air fresheners and a Toblerone. Both were used because of the complex aspirational and social messages that were contained within the objects and their advertising.
The two pieces in this show, After the Rain and Glade®, Jasmine Mist™, are titled after the names of real air freshener scents. The piece After the Rain was a mass of heated tarmac, irrigated with water to produce what I felt to be a true urban after the rain smell. Glade®, Jasmine Mist™ depicted the aerosol vapour of the same name sprayed into my parent's living room in an effort to produce a visual jasmine mist.
A real chocolate Toblerone featured in an installation, every part of which was derived from the messages given to the consumer by the product; its form and derivation seems to be purely concerned with the romantic and sublime. The shape is from the Matterhorn in Switzerland and the logo on the box is a silhouette of that mountain with a bear hidden within the graphic. This chocolate bar seems to exemplify that escapist desire that concerns much of my work.
The material and the subject matter dictate the action that shapes my artwork. The air freshener wants to be sprayed, the hairdryer wants to blow air and fly, and the Toblerone wants to become a mountain range. I see my practice as the actions of someone who is constantly excited and bewildered at the world before him, trying to explain it in his own way.