I hope you’ll enjoy another varied selection of my work from the White Hot Magazine interview archive.

As always, if you have any suggestions for interviews you’d like to see on this blog, or at White Hot, let me know.

And if you’re a talented artist, designer or writer, drop me a line! I’m working on some conversations with awesome creative women right now and they will appear here oh so soon…

Mariko Mori, 'Miracle', 2001

Interview with Mariko Mori, Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, July 2008

BH: Your latest installation at the Baltic is called Miracle. Do you believe in miracles? Or do you think art might be a kind of miracle?

MM: I think that the term miracle is very difficult to define, but often I experience [something like it] during the process of making work. I have coincidence, I have some support, I have good surprises, sometimes a good accident, and it seems to me, not every work, but some work, has very much a feeling of blessing, feeling like something not only from my ability but it could be a corporate effort. I can’t give evidence, but I know that the work was supposed to be produced and exist and it almost has its own destiny, like a human being or any other living being. If you can call that ‘miracle’, possibly you could say that. But when you think about the existence of living beings on the earth, it seems to me very close to a miracle to have a living being, because we know there’s not much life in the universe apart from us. It’s a very long answer but I don’t know…

More on Mariko Mori at White Hot Magazine…

Nicolas Deshayes, 'Primordial Furnishings', 2007

Interview with Nicolas Deshayes, London, October 2007

BH: You’ve been working and exhibiting prolifically in the last couple of years. Has the experience of continuously making things for shows (making things that you know in advance will have an audience) changed the work at all, or do you make things firstly for your own eyes?

ND: Pressure of making work for more than one show in a very short amount of time, forces you to think on your feet and have faith in your decisions. I think it is important to be instinctive as interesting things come out of this.

More on Nicolas at White Hot Magazine…

Richard Forster, 'Latvian Hippies', 2007

Interview with Richard Forster, Saltburn, February 2008

BH: Sometimes I get so worried about art being a place you can go to escape or hide in and I wanted to ask you about it because of that quote about galleries being a quiet place. In contrast you seem to spend a lot of time looking outside, responding to things that are outside of you. Do you think art should be something of an ethical pursuit?

RF: That sounds like a question…

BH: I want to ask this question to artists who have kept going for a while because it must be something you think about?

RF: In many ways its one of the problems in art isn’t it… It has been addressed in a lot of practice. Sometimes one kind of art can seem more relevant than another. The idea of finding a socialised content outside of purely formal solutions. I don’t think I’ve made enough sculpture, or enough sculptural shows, where you’d be able to see whether an arrangement works…where you had a very formal, self-referencing object next to an object full of outside, social references and issues. If you were to put the two together you may conclude that this was an artist who had not yet made up their mind…you could say I haven’t made up my mind really. I think that’s ok. You’ve got these questions, I can’t make up my mind, then the project is one of working it through… that’s the problem you’ve set yourself.

More on Richard at White Hot Magazine…

Kendell Geers at BALTIC

Interview with Kendell Geers, Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead

BH: Your Baltic exhibition text talked about the absence of any belief system in contemporary art. Is there a firm belief structure behind your own work? What motivates you to keep going?

KG: I am much more influenced by the ideas and theories of the ancient alchemists than anything in the past 250 years. Many of the seemingly superstitious notions of the alchemists are now being “discovered” to be in fact closer to the “truth” by quantum physicists than we ever imagined. I have always said that my art is the by-product of my life and is conceived of as some kind an embodiment of a thought or expression rather than in terms of metaphor or even representation. I continue working in the art structures because I have the most freedom there to work without compromise and outside of any predetermined structure. It is a viral system that tolerates dissent as long as it is able to turn a profit but that precisely is its strength – selling subversive entities and talismanic structures to the world’s most powerful people. A small shift in the consciousness of such a person can create a ripple effect that in turn changes the lives of a thousand others.

More on Kendell Geers at White Hot Magazine…

Simon Faithfull, 2008

Interview with Simon Faithfull, Slade School of Art, London, May 2008

BH:You’ve described the ‘Escape Vehicles’ as being ‘tinged with the melancholy of failure’. Is that something deliberate?

SF: The ‘melancholy of failure’ is almost like a substance that I sculpt with. Even when something is shockingly successful, like the chair genuinely getting to the edge of space… I was quite prepared for that to be an attempt that would fail, it was unlikely that it would get that high but it actually did. But even in that case, I’m inviting the audience to imagine sitting in that chair. If you did you would be going where it is minus 60 degrees, there’s no oxygen, it would be impossible to live there. So there is this kind of forlornness, impossibility implied within it, you can’t actually escape this realm. And I think art, however optimistic it is, in some ways it’s always going to fail. I think that’s a strength. A painting of a flower is never going to be more than the actual flower that it represents, but it’s the actual trying to do this gesture which is inevitably going to fail. That’s the beauty…

More of Simon Faithfull at White Hot Magazine…

Thanks so much for reading! Feedback always welcome.

Becky X x