The Art of Staying Home, with James Rogers

Firstly how are you feeling today?

What a nice opening line, so important to check on each other at the moment. I’m doing great thank you, been having the most wonderful breakfasts all week aha!

Tell us about your art and your studio.

My practice has grown out of many places, starting with my upbringing in falling-apart Wolverhampton, my father as an electrician, my early interests in technology and gaming. This grew naturally into an interest in machines, focusing around made up machines originally (like Tilly Matthew’s Air Loom or Gustav Mesmer’s flying machines) but then this gradually grew into a functional interest once I discovered the open source projects based around 3D printing.

My studio as a kind of fusion place for all these technologies and machines I’m either building or hacking, working with materials such as bronze, copper, wax and most recently clay to create sculptures. 

I’m primarily concerned with exploring figuration and our relationships, picking apart this network that exists amongst us and how it operates amongst technological devices and their images, as well as our own interdependencies and anxieties.

Do you normally work from home?

Not at all, I’ll maybe work on a few things here in the morning or evening, but I’m either at the studio, working at a friends, or working out and about. I’m quite fortunate in that I live so close to the studio, and can access it without needing to interact with anyone else, that I’ve still been heading along occasionally, however I’ve certainly cut that down with lockdown measures in place, spending most of my time currently working from home.

How has your day to day life changed since COVID-19?

Well I’m certainly eating and sleeping better these days, spending time checking in on friends and family to make sure they are okay. My immediate world has gotten much smaller, consisting mainly of myself, my laptop, phone, and sketchbook. It’s great in some ways as I said I can get really focused, spending much more time researching and honing in on a single idea, however I’m certainly missing real interaction, even a nice handshake or hug on greeting seems so strange and forgotten right now.

What are you doing creatively to stay calm and mindful?

I’m still continuing to work towards creating sculptures and drawings, however most of this is taking place across sketching in my sketchbook, 3D scanning to create geometry and models, and then manipulating this further on my computer. It’s here that the isolation period has been most useful in that I’ve really been experimenting with how to ‘break’ these digital sculptures, recently coming across what is known as data bending - converting, manipulating, and opening these files in unconventional ways to create unexpected results.

I also love spending time getting into the really deep parts of YouTube, and it’s here that I find some of my best sources of inspiration for work. It acts in a kind of gentle way though, beginning with a light video on say sculpture in Rome, then gradually descending through the conspiracy theorist ‘layer’ and onwards into YouTube’s murky depths. I’ll usually be watching these taking notes and screenshots, working out different points of reference and the relationships between them.

Do you have any creative ideas for people to do at home?

One of the most fun, explorational, and minimally messy things I’d recommend from home is collage. I know you may have been put off by this medium after your GCSE art teacher told you to stick some images down with a pritt stick and they ended up looking messy, but I can’t stress the importance of collage enough in helping people to understand themselves visually. Once you get into a state of flow, you can end up making works that mirror thoughts and ideas you may not have even been immediately aware of, I think it’s a really good way to do some self exploration, as well as being able to sharpen your visual brain and work out what images you associate with from here you can build this up further, kind of like automatic writing. William Burroughs once said that painting was fifty years ahead of writing as they had been collaging pieces together - so he began his ‘cut-up’ technique. Also collage doesn’t have to be messy and school grade - think Max Ernst.

What do you think the world will have learned from this?

 I’d hope to see a greater recognition of who has been supportive and who hasn’t during these times, including boycotting the various figureheads and organisations that have forced workers to take unpaid leave. It would be great to see people more in support of those that have been here for us during the times when it’s needed.

It will also be great for people to be able to see how much support they can actually bring to the world, like I kind of hope that some people who don’t value themselves enough can actually realise that they do have a sphere of influence, and their actions do affect people. 

Is there anything else you’d like to add?

Thank you for taking the time to talk with me about my practice, I look forward to seeing how the auction goes, and I hope you stay safe and well.

He wound up too busy to realise he was looking through the telescope (tunnel vision) by James Rogers