John James Marshall thesis.pdf - OpenAIR @ RGU - Robert Gordon ...

36. In terms of discipline where do you do you locate your practice?
37. How would you identify the community of practice or discipline
that you most closely relate to?
Self-defined product artist [Laughs]. It’s one of those things that you always get
asked; is either are you a designer are you a maker… are you a ceramicist? I do a
bit of everything. I touch a bit of every medium I can get my hands on. It’s
because the project demands it. At the end of the day it’s just a material and it
should be represented that way. I think I’m very traditional in that way. I think
the ‘artist’ comes from the process. All the objects can be products, but I do have
a very alternative way of making it – I sit down at the computer and I do
outsource a lot of my work, just because I can’t make it here. Three other guys in
my studio are industrial designers. Being an artist…the cups and saucers could
be, one day I hope, very successful pieces of design. They work, they exist. The
whole idea of a bespoke set, you could customise, you could go crazy and apply
that same theory to it and materialise something that has no material
properties. You could apply it to anything. I’ve done pieces in materialised
sound, like the Jurassic Park thing – the dinosaur does that [slaps table] and the
water moves. That’s the artist side of it, the vision side and imagination - that’s
how they bonded together and its very similar to the convergence idea. There
are a lot of designers now who are creating artistic pieces and they will not be
called artists.
38. How would you define the relationship between your work and
its audience?
I think it’s through familiarity. All my work is…people can relate to it in the way
the moth flies round the lightbulb. Everyone has had that experience. The initial
bird, which was a pigeon, was my mum’s budgie which flew round the house.
The cup and saucer, everyone blows on a cup of tea. The candelabra came from
walking down Portobello market. Everyone’s had these experiences, it’s not just
me. I think the new technologies people can’t relate to it sometimes. People are
relating to my work because they’ve had the experience, at last that’s what I’m
hoping for. At my RCA show I had a bad space and I made a nice installation of
a house. Very straightforward, very slick. It had the bird, the moth and a TV
showing people how the process works. All of a sudden everyone was like;
“Right, I know exactly where I am, I can relate to it” and that’s why the
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