An Interview with Gary Winters

By Catherine Jessett-Brown

As his exhibition ‘Made And Unmade Both’ comes to a close at the Field System gallery, we found some time to ask Gary Winters a few questions about his show, his work with Lone Twin and his love of creating graffiti art.

The title of your exhibition, Made And Unmade Both, is taken from the last lines of the novel ‘How To Be Both’ by Ali Smith. How has this book influenced your work?

I heard an interview with Ali Smith on the radio talking about her work and I just heard the title to start with. It sparked something in my head, about things coexisting together and if you put two things together, there's an immediate relationship or tension between them.

So I read the book and, as the title suggests, it has a dual narrative that overlaps sometimes. They're just parts of their own little stories, but then they sort of meet and inhabit a space together. So it's very lovely intertwined work. And hopefully these pieces suggest an acceptance and insistence on an intertwining of states and things. The other set of works that are here are the pastel pieces, which I've just been making in parallel, so I've had these two things going side by side. In both collections I’m working over the top of a found image. With both sets you can kind of see a trace of their past lives. What it was and what it is now.

Why did you decide to use vintage images within your compositions?

It's been decided for me in some way because I bought the whole set of them from an auction house about 10 years ago. And it's three different sets, so it's the animals, sort of, which, hilariously enough, are called ‘Useful Animals of the World’, then ‘Historical Moments’ and then the ‘Botanical Classification of Plants’. I just liked them as things- the palette and the feel of them.

And then about a couple of years ago, I thought I'd do something with them, because I do like them as they are, but also you can sort of fetishize them, give them too much weight as vintage prints. As lovely as they are, they are sort of mass produced as well. The posters are stamped 1957, which is the beginning of the contemporary world where it's on the cusp of rock'n'roll, of pop art and conceptual art movements as well as big cultural movements in music and film, much of the culture that has defined my life.

A couple of years ago I started to work with specifically the posters that featured animals. I started to screen print out the animals as a little comment on ‘In 1957 we could quite happily look at crocodiles, gazelles, seals, and whales etc. But where are we at now?’ I blocked them out and left landscapes which often had just humans left.

I've sort of worked with found images before; I was a graffiti artist in my youth and as I've been sitting and painting on these things, some of that has come back. I would sit for hours and hours as a teenager, constructing these little ways that words interlocked. My dad was a cinema projectionist in the East End of London, and he would mischievously scratch little speech bubbles onto the film reels, and that also came to mind when I was working with these pieces.

When I put the words onto these found images, I have to negotiate where they land, so there's little decisions and a ‘choreography’ of where a letter sits behind something. There is also interplay between the words themselves and their background, and they speak to the process of creating and selling art. For example, ‘Be Yours And Mine’; it wasn’t until I sold the piece that I realised it could apply to the previous artists’ version and my version, and also to the exchange between the creator and the buyer.

You have previously worked as co-artistic Director of Lone Twin and you have a background in performance art. Has this influenced the work in this exhibition and your wider creative practice?

Yes. The work we've done with Lone Twin, definitely. We play with known things by flipping them and giving an opportunity to look at them in a different way, either in a different form or, again, in a juxtaposition.

There’s maybe a little bit of flavour of it in this, in that in our works we use words quite a lot. Often, we're talking, there's only one piece where it's silent, which is our silent 12-hour line dance piece. So, we've often tried to find a little ‘shape’ of a phrase that we can repeat and we like lists.

We like to use repeating phrases; we did quite a long piece in Brussels; it was 24 days long, the length of a festival, but we proposed to make 1000 toasts, (like when you raise your glasses), that was the challenge of the piece. We celebrated what had happened during each day when we would be out cycling, so ‘to this, to that, to them’… which can also be spatial, like ‘to the end of the road’, ‘to the top of the hill’, ‘to the east, to the west’. There was an address of these toasts to an audience each night. The words on the pieces in this show are also very rhythmic, so yes, that really comes into it.

So people who know my previous work [with Lone Twin], will see this interest in phrases that might be tumbling through different mutations, different versions, in playful ways and I like the works in this current show that are not perfect, where you can see the hand and the little inconsistencies. So yeah, I guess there's a sort of fragility and vulnerability; it sort of pulls me in. Most of us have empathy, so if there is a little kind of wobble or vulnerability then I’m drawn to it.

I loved reading about the boat Lone Twin made with objects donated by members of the public. These donations all have special meanings to the people that shared them, and there is something very vulnerable and beautiful about that- the imagery of the boat being sent into the waves, as well. Would you say meaning and vulnerability are important to creative practice?

Yes. All the different stories that came with those objects are thousands of lives that they’ve touched. And again, you get the two ends of the scale. We love that you can have the very poetic sitting next to you everyday, so it's the same with when the objects [people had donated] turned up.

The only stipulation [for donations] was that they had to have been made of wood, so you get things that were handed down, family heirlooms, quite precious important things for people. But they thought this was a great project or kind of resting place for that piece, knowing you'd still have a life in the boat. And then a wrapped IKEA shelf would come in and you know someone didn't have time to put this up, but it's kicking around. But we'd accept both and they would have equal status in that project. People didn't know how we were going to do it. And it was a big technical risk, really pushing the boundaries of the yacht building technologies and processes. And yeah, it is very beautiful when you see that on the water, that was a lovely sort of final act that it would fly through the water. It's almost silent.

Both Gregg Whelan and I from Lone Twin are not trained actors and we're not trained dancers, so there's a fragility in us attempting these projects and performances, like dancing for 12 hours, 24 days cycling, a journey dragging a Telegraph pole across a town. To see us doing that as ordinary people, is much more interesting for us. I'm drawn to voices that remind me of that Leonard Cohen quote about there's a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in. So, if there's a little chink and a little sort of crack in it then somehow light and life is getting in amongst that. You can see the person there.

So, would you say that participation in creative work, whether in performance or noticing these small inconsistencies and ‘cracks’, has a positive and encouraging impact on people?

Completely. Yeah. And I think maybe that's why people have got involved in a lot of our projects, like The 250, that focused on acts of kindness.

Some of our work has attempted to sort of frame that kind of act more directly than others, but it sometimes happened alongside it, as seen in the piece where we dragged telegraph poles; sometimes people would come and help us do that because it looked like we were struggling- which we were. Also, in the line dance piece people were blindfolded, but were able to hear others dancing alongside us as a sort of act of kindness and encouragement and support. We tried not to stop, but we could hear people carrying on the rhythm for us. So we can see this in those small ways, as well as something quite involved. Yeah, completely!

We also made an embroidered patch reading ‘Good Luck Everybody’. [Author Note: Thank you Gary for the awesome patch] We would say this at the beginning and at the end of performances to the audience as a bit of a joke. But we did mean it, you know we were kind of sincere, but the joke at the beginning was funny because you’ve paid your money and sitting down wherever you sit down or you're involved, you've arrived. But you don't quite know what's going to happen. So good luck over the next, roughly, hour and a half. And then at the end it was like good luck to send you out back to the world with that same energy like, you might not know what you're going to get, but we wish you luck! It is a hopeful, kind sort of gesture there.

Final question, have you been enjoying your time at Field System?

It's been great, really great and I've been sitting working as well. It's always lovely to have a bit of time, and really nice responses from people. I've had a couple of occasions in the last year of having my work in a little group show and you get nice responses there, but I often haven't been there when the show's been on.

I don't always announce myself as the artist. When people come in, I sometimes just direct them to the information. You may sometimes be sitting in the corner a little bit too much for some people. But there have been some really lovely comments and things people have said. It's that thing where you put something out there and you don't quite know how it will land- and often it lands in very different ways. Some people pickup on the sort of rhythm, some on the ‘perfect’ nature, some work out why some words are paired together, and actually lots of people have suggested several philosophers that may have been influential. Some people have taken more with the pastel work and that is nice to talk about.

And I guess for people who live in the town, it's such an amazing thing, for this kind of thing to be happening, you know, to have a new gallery that is focused on celebrating local artists and creators as well as bringing in contemporary, challenging, and interesting art from elsewhere to the town and the region. It's been fantastic, and very lovely to have this work together and the space to put it up.

Ahh thank you Gary! Made and Unmade Both runs until 5pm on Saturday 23rd March.