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  • Roger Hiorns: interview

  • By Helen Sumpter

    Updated: Mon Sep 1 2008

  • Artist Roger Hiorns talks to Time Out about his Jerwood/Artangel commission to transform a former council flat into a sparkling blue environment of copper sulphate crystals - which has earned him a Turner Prize nomination

    Roger Hiorns: interview

    © Nick Cobbing

  • In the middle of a two-storey, L-shaped block of boarded-up bedsits in the shadow of a large housing estate near the Old Kent Road, it’s draining day for artist Roger Hiorns. There’s still a week to go before his latest and largest installation to date, entitled ‘Seizure’, is unveiled to the public. Yet his team of assistants are busy round the clock and today are beginning to siphon out the 90,000 litres of bright blue, super-saturated copper-sulphate solution (enough to fill a large swimming pool), that for the past two-and-a-half weeks has been cooling in a metal tank lining the entire volume of one of the ground-floor corner bedsits. When all the liquid is emptied and the metal tank cut away, there should be a thick growth of copper sulphate crystals covering the walls, floor and ceiling, but at this stage even Hiorns isn’t entirely sure what, if anything, will be revealed. Feature continues

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    ‘I’ve always liked the idea of inconsistency in my work,’ Hiorns explains, as another container of solution is trundled past for disposal, ‘and to be able to obscure my responsibility for making aesthetic choices. When growing copper-sulphate crystals you never know what the result will be so it’s a way of passing that responsibility on and effectively taking myself out of the creative process. I’ve been working with copper-sulphate solution for ten years now, so this project is not only an escalation of that work, but also, perhaps, a logical conclusion.’

    Other objects Hiorns has coated with the solution include BMW car engines, thistles and architectural models, all of which have emerged encrusted with a glittering layer of intense crystalline blue. While the tiny forms themselves are shiny and jewel-like, the sculptures as a whole are often far more problematic. ‘The crystallisation isn’t about the beautification of the object because the crystals are actually very acidic,’ Hiorns says, ‘so with the engines – in a way the clumsiest metaphor for power I could think of– they’re actually being eroded rather than adorned.’

    This often difficult relationship between objects, their materials and industrial, man-made and natural processes and substances runs throughout Hiorns’s work, with past sculptures including detergent-filled ceramics slowly pumping out columns of white foam. He’s also made sculptures using perfume and his own semen. For his next trick, Hiorns will be combining huge ceramic filters used in air conditioners with biological matter from calves’ brains. ‘All these works relate in some way to hygiene and obsessive-compulsiveness and a fear of losing control of one’s personal structures – such as in the brain disease CJD,’ Hiorns explains, ‘so while they’re sculptural objects, they’re also an extension of psychological thought.’

    ‘Seizure’ is the latest commission from Artangel (here in conjunction with Jerwood), whose previous projects that have also created a relationship with disused urban architecture include Rachel Whiteread’s concrete cast of the interior of a terraced house and Kutlug Ataman’s video document – installed within an empty central London sorting office – of the occupants of an Istanbul shanty town. Hiorns’s residential block (which is being demolished after ‘Seizure’ closes) may not have been chosen for its architectural style but its previous function as domestic housing does create its own resonances with Hiorns and his work. ‘Caves are the earliest forms of dwelling and crystal caves do occur naturally in the form of salt and gypsum caves,’ he says. ‘And in a way this project is converting a concrete modernist building into a cave. The work isn’t about architecture but there is that element of architectural reversion about it. Plus I am originally from Birmingham, so, for me, being surrounded by concrete is natural.’

    Back at the bedsit, more than half of the solution has been drained and the crew are cutting a shaft-like, square opening into the top of the tank from the floor of the bedsit above, to take the first look. It’s quite an amazing sight. Not only is the revealed area of wall covered with overlapping, scaley layers of jagged blue crystals, but there are dense, glass-like shards, at least several inches long. Hiorns will have to wait to find out how visitors will react to the experience of walking into his blue cavern, but he’s aware that here it won’t be the crystals eroding what’s underneath but the presence of the public eroding the surface of the crystals. ‘I’m also expecting a certain amount of crystals to disappear through trophy hunting,’ Hiorns says, ‘but that will also become part of the work.’

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