The spot-lighter

Interview, Oct, 1998 by David Furnish

DAVID FURNISH: The past year or two has been jam-packed for you, starting perhaps with the recognition you received during the last Venice Biennale and continuing to the present.

SAM TAYLOR-WOOD: And personally It's been an intense period, too. I had my daughter, Angelica, a month before Venice, then I got married, and then just a few days after that I was diagnosed with cancer.

DF: You underwent major surgery, and you've gone through a process of recovery.

STW: Year, and all through that your thoughts become very strange. After the operation, you have this total elation because you've survived and now you've got your whole life before you.

DF: Since you work mostly within the mediums of film and video, It's difficult to show your work pictorially. How would you describe it to someone unfamiliar with it?

STW: I'm interested in taking raw human emotions and then isolating them without any narrative structure. In order to achieve this, I try to break out of the narrative conventions that you'd see in a typical feature film. For example, if you were to see an argument in the cinema, you would see where that argument started because it came out of a progressive structure. I'm much more interested in showing the individual form of that argument - its basis and emotional content.

DF: Can you explain this in relation to one of your works?

STW: I made this piece called Travesty of a Mockery, which features a man and a woman arguing. I filmed each of them with separate cameras, shouting across the same room at each other, and then projected them individually on opposite facing walls. It ends up looking like they are shouting across a room at each other. When you see this, you don't understand why they're fighting, but you understand instantly the feeling that's going on between them. There's a great moment when the woman throws a glass of milk into the face of the man. You can't escape feeling like a participant.

DF: By isolating human emotion like that, are you trying to make a larger social comment?

STW: I'm interested in looking at the minuscule details of something in order to recognize the grand scale. There's a sense right now of people feeling disconnected from the world we live in, of feeling slightly out-of-harmony with their environment.

DF: Did being part of a certain generation in the art world affect the way you approach your art?

STW: I went to Goldsmith College of Art in London in the '80s and there I made sculptures, but the objects had nothing to do with how I was thinking. I was making beautifully sanded wooden boxes! After I left college I went to work at the Royal Opera House in London, which became a real catalyst for me because it made me realize that I was interested in cinema and in the way life is thrust at you. So I started making films.

DF: Was that because with film you could explore emotions that you couldn't express In sculpture or photography?

STW: Yes. But it's been important for me as well to make film in different formats in order to express different things. When I made Brontosaurus, about a man dancing naked in his bedroom, it was important that it have a home-movie feel to it. I filmed him for half an hour, and after watching the footage I decided to slow things down because his movements were so bizarre.

DF: It reminds me of those moments on news programs when they do slow-motion tributes - for example, Princess Diana hugging children and picking up flowers in slow motion. It's a suspension of life and time - an act of mourning.

STW: Yes. I made Brontosaurus at just the time when quite a few people around me had died. Sometimes, I think, your work is a bit ahead of you without you realizing it.

DF: What made you want to be an artist?

STW: I didn't want a job. [laughs] Seriously, I wanted to be an artist because I saw that it meant endless possibilities. I came from a badly managed family background so art was a way of reinventing myself.

DF: How did your experience at Goldsmith Influence you?

STW: Well, all around me were these brilliant contemporaries who were making the most exciting artwork I had seen for a long time. That was inspiring, but as people became superstars while still at college the school became a very strange environment. It was sort of oppressive for a while.

DF: How much of the artistic rejuvenation brought about by Goldsmith's graduates and others had to do with the changes taking place in Britain at the time? Because Britain is a vastly different country from what it was twenty years ago.

STW: We were living in a time that was very unsupportive of the arts, and we were aware of that. And, very often, when you are handed things on a plate, you don't work quite so hard for what you want. When you're being starved of any possibility, you work much harder. That's what happened here. People like Damien Hirst came out and put on their own exhibitions and forced their way into what seemed like quite a difficult world to enter.

DF: Can you talk for a minute about the process you go through to make your art?