THOMAS HOUSEAGO

SINCE FIRST BREAKING THROUGH IN THE 1990S, YORKSHIRE-BORN THOMAS HOUSEAGO HAS BECOME ONE OF THE MOST CELEBRATED FIGURATIVE SCULPTORS WORKING ON THE CONTEMPORARY SCENE TODAY. ON THE EVE OF HIS FIRST RETROSPECTIVE IN FRANCE, AT THE MUSÉE D’ART MODERNE DE LA VILLE DE PARIS, AMERICAN WRITER EVGENIA CITKOWITZ CAUGHT UP WITH HIM IN HIS LOS ANGELES STUDIO.

Evgenia Citkowitz: There’s always been a performative aspect to your work. In your student days you would wrestle and dive into clay, which was the main event. Now this might be a ritual part of your process, but it isn’t necessarily apparent in the finished work. Thomas Houseago: My first real artworks, made at Jacob Kramer College of Art in Leeds when I was 18 or 19, were actually performances. During them, through certain actions such as burning things, jumping on things, or covering myself in things, things and objects would often end up being being made, so those were the kind of acts that needed objects, that needed materials. At that time, I saw my body as very much part of the material. My first sculptures were leftovers, if you like, from performances, and as time went on, when I went to London, in 1991, I became more interested in freestyling sculptures, and the idea that performance was an action needed to make them kind of moved into the background, but was always still there. Once in L.A., I completely lost myself to the sculptural object. I almost lost track of my body in that process, and my action was pretty much just the compulsive making of objects.

Your sculpture Cast Studio, which is being shown in Paris, evokes a primeval landscape that’s also prototheatre: ossified chairs wait for visitors; a gnarled mesa rises to form a stage; a dug-out trench could be a fort, a place of rest or of committal. Your partner, Muna El Fituri, has documented your process in a remarkable series of photographs and films where you fall, grapple, ease and pound the clay into submission. Could you tell me about the origins of Cast Studio?

It represents a return, and at the same time a move forward. Its roots are in my earliest experiences with materials: playing in the sandpit, finding clay and mud, making objects. In many ways the piece represents a kind of regression, but at the same time it’s about what’s happening in my life now. My collaboration with Muna is much more fully realized in this piece. When we first met, we worked closely together and began really looking at each other, looking at what we were doing. I became interested again in the actions around the objects, and in the nature of the studio – the people who came by, the way I work, the kind of actions needed to make it work. So in many ways, the idea of filming and photographing the making of the sculpture, which ended up being the final piece, was the result of the conversations that Muna and I had had for many years, about the fact that Muna was making her own photographs in the studio, and she was watching and documenting me, and we were discussing where the work came from, certain obsessions and mannerisms. To some extent, Cast Studio evolved out of these discussions. The piece embodies my current ideas about sculpture and how it interacts with viewers, with people, with an audience, that a sculpture is a forum for other