Excerpt from a conversation with Sabine Schaschl
SSCH: You have been travelling through the eastern part of Europe lately and have visited former communist countries. When one looks closely at your latest wall installation at the Toby Webster Gallery, you can see a certain influence of eastern architecture. How have these trips influenced your work?
TP: These trips were a big influence on my work, both aesthetically speaking and in relation to my process. They really consolidated for me the enjoyable but, I suppose, somewhat quixotic practice of going out into an unfamiliar landscape and hunting for forms and situations of interest. The basic approach is always one of being open (-minded), of looking and responding. In that sense it’s inevitable that what I encountered during my wanderings in Central and Eastern Europe found its way into the work in terms of form and colour.
SSCH: When seeing the installation images of your latest show I had the impression that your work is becoming more painterly in a way. The walls are grey and you can clearly see a cloudy shade within the brush strokes. Is this a new development?
TP: I think I’m finally giving in to being
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Excerpt from a conversation with Sabine Schaschl
SSCH: You have been travelling through the eastern part of Europe lately and have visited former communist countries. When one looks closely at your latest wall installation at the Toby Webster Gallery, you can see a certain influence of eastern architecture. How have these trips influenced your work?
TP: These trips were a big influence on my work, both aesthetically speaking and in relation to my process. They really consolidated for me the enjoyable but, I suppose, somewhat quixotic practice of going out into an unfamiliar landscape and hunting for forms and situations of interest. The basic approach is always one of being open (-minded), of looking and responding. In that sense it’s inevitable that what I encountered during my wanderings in Central and Eastern Europe found its way into the work in terms of form and colour.
SSCH: When seeing the installation images of your latest show I had the impression that your work is becoming more painterly in a way. The walls are grey and you can clearly see a cloudy shade within the brush strokes. Is this a new development?
TP: I think I’m finally giving in to being a painter! The experiences that led to the making of this newer work were powerful enough for me to want to register some kind of palpable shift. From my point of view the brush strokes are less about my hand being visible in the work (something with which I have never been very concerned) and more a way of hinting at dissolution and unfamiliarity. In recent years I’ve felt the need to actively introduce visible doubt and a sort of lightly controlled chaos within my work as opposed to implying entropy through impossibly perfect images. The short answer would be that the clarity that characterised certain bodies of older work was often read only as an aspiration to perfection with less engagement being made with inevitable corresponding shadows of such idealised aspirations.
SSCH: I also noticed the use of photographs within the group of works in the installation. Is this the first time you have used photographs as an equal element in the installed group of works?
TP: I have used photographs tactically in installations before, but I felt the influence of the research photographs on the development of much of the work had to be clearly acknowledged. There are some key images through which all the ideas involved in the show flowed and a very direct presentation of them as matter-of-fact documents rather than finely wrought pieces of photography (I’m certainly not a photographer) felt like the way to go. They were presented as a raw link to the source, as it were. This notion was extended with the production of a small artist’s book that contained an edited selection of the 5000 images I had accumulated on my travels.
SSCH: Are the works in an installation also seen as individual works that can be bought separately?
TP: Yes, almost all individual works can be shown or bought separately. It is just the case that when a comprehensive body of work is made, I often like to extend the thoughts behind it into the way it is installed.
SSCH: What are your plans for the show in Zurich?
TP: The work for the show ‘Built Colour’ will reinforce the use of some of the formal elements of colour and visual texture that have surfaced in my recent work in response to some photographic secondary source material. This is quite an unusual approach for me, but it has resulted in reliefs, collages and a wall painting that have a certain independence from my expériences of the ‘outside world’. The show might almost seem as if it’s a rarefied collection of autonomous paintings!
