Tell us about your work.
All of my work is related in some way to language, and I work primarily in porcelain. Metaphors are mongrels, linguistic mash-ups. A city is a language, for example. That's the idea behind Shanghai 1931, a low-relief sculptural map of Shanghai made from porcelain clays. It's based on a paper map published by British colonial authorities in 1931: I took impressions in porcelain of texts from a variety of writers ranging from Dante to André Malraux, Lu Xun and on to Italo Calvino, James Joyce and Allen Ginsberg. I cut up the texts and assembled them into a map where the words become streets, hotels and other buildings, public squares, the so-called Chinese City, and the river that runs through the city. For some parts of the piece I used alphabet stamps — the 1842 Treaty of Nanking in the lower right corner, for example. The Treaty ended the First Opium War and opened up five port cities, including Shanghai, to trade in opium, which the British shipped in from India, so the piece also references colonial history. Malraux set his novel Man's Fate (La Condition Humaine) in the streets of Shanghai in 1927, Lu Xun is represented by his famous story Ah Q. The Calvino connection is from his wonderful book, Le Città Invisibili (Invisible Cities), and Joyce appears in the river with quotes from the Anna Livia Plurabelle section of Finnegans Wake.
Aside from metaphors, what other ways does language figure in your work?
Sometimes I use individual words that I made out of porcelain in Jingdezhen, China. It's an amazing place that still bills itself as the porcelain capital of the world. While I was there I made a few thousand words, some glazed, some not, all fired in the Jingdezhen kilns, and used them later in a number of different pieces. I built several Towers of Babble from the fired words, and I used them as rubble in Rubbleyards. Lenin and Stalin appear in those photographs as bone china or porcelain busts.
What are you working on now?
I'm in the middle of an extended project where I make postcards and envelopes in porcelain and stoneware, inscribed with text fragments and using decals for addresses, marks and postage stamps. There are three themes running through the work - love, solidarity and defiance (see ElectricAffinities). I've been going to Jingdezhen for years now, usually now for two months at a time. I spend a good part of the year preparing for each trip, reading and choosing texts and identifying correspondents -- the people I have write to each other with text fragments as the message. The correspondence is all imagined, but together the writers and artists who send each other messages form an ideal community bound by love, solidarity and defiance. I act as an interlocutor, bringing these people and their poems and texts together in porcelain. Many of the authors I am reading now are Palestinians - poets and writers - and to date I have made quite a number of cards that center Palestine, its history and the ongoing genocide.
What are the "Voiceboxes"?
In one trip to Jingdezhen I made several radios as part of a series of hand-built, press-molded or slipcast ceramic radios, books and letters/envelopes. Many of them have "speaker grilles" (holes punched in the clay before firing), from which I imagine different voices emerging. I've been working with voices for years, mostly in my writing. My novel The Book of Dog deals with the relationship between the artist and the voices they hear — real or imagined. Voice in fiction is like style in the visual arts, a signature. Even if you're lucky enough to be in possession of a voice, it doesn't belong to you. It's more like it possesses you. It's also a gift, and I think your responsibility as an artist is to develop it, to listen and to let it speak, for you or through you and embedded in your work.
Is "voice" a metaphor?
It's more like a pars pro toto, it represents the artist's work as a whole. I like taking metaphors literally. Freud's talk about digging up the unconscious — comparing himself to an archaeologist excavating ancient Rome — eventually led me to write a novel about a detective who mounts an archaeological dig within the confines of an apartment in Berlin, digging up the past and destroying the place in the process. The metaphor that governs the novel wound up setting the tone for much of my later work, because to understand a metaphor — and some kinds of jokes — you have to see double: you see the literal surface and then you see something else and suddenly you get the joke or make the connection and you see both aspects at once. I think that holds for all of my work, at least ideally. At some point the surface collapses and gives way to another layer or layers beneath it.
What have metaphors got to do with your sculptures?
Metaphors compress disparate worlds into a figure that lives on the border between them (see Mongrels). Implicit in the compression is conflict, sometimes violent conflict – a clash of cultures, materials, languages. The figurative sculptures are creatures caught crossing borders, so you see both worlds at once, in collision and conflict. If I'm looking for inspiration I go to Ovid's Metamorphoses - full of wondrous and terrifying stories of subversive, defiant transgression and the violence of punitive transformation meted out by the gods. I'm interested in the conflict and cross-breeding that generates hybrids. There's a wonderful book of poetry by Ted Hughes called Tales from Ovid which I turn to again and again in my work. The language is amazing.
Franz Kafka shows up in a lot of your work. Why Kafka?
I read him a long time ago and again when I went to China. I read The Great Wall and used it for a lot of the work in porcelain, in particular the Towers of Babble. At one level it's about authority — who's telling you what to do and how you respond. The narrator ends up suggesting it could be bad for your health to think too much about the orders you're following — better to stop thinking altogether.
You've got Lenin as well. What's with that?
At some point after the Soviet Union collapsed I bought a bone china bust of Lenin, of the sort I imagine you'd have seen in offices and schools all over the country. I made a number of porcelain casts with different inscriptions: Nutcase, Radio Lennon, Above Us Only Sky, etc.
What about The Rainmaker?
Another piece I made in China. It's a mashup of a drainpipe and the torso of the Lenin bust. I grafted the drain - it looks like a shower head - onto the body and fired it first with a powder blue slip and then with a clear glaze that turned it dark blue. Then later, when I was back in Milan, I hung a bunch of porcelain pendants around its neck. I see them resembling votive offerings like you see beneath the portraits of saints in Byzantine churches, in Greece and Naples and other places in Italy. Rainmaker is a voicebox, the idea being that the voice you hear comes from somewhere else. Leonard Cohen said, "Poetry comes from a place that no one commands and no one conquers." I think most artists have some sense of a muse, of trying to communicate with or channel whatever it is in that place Cohen talks about.