ARTWORKER OF THE WEEK #7

Liam Gillick @ Tate Britain

Coats of Asbestos Spangled with Mica, 2002
Anodized aluminium framework, Perspex panels (840 x 1680 cm)

Liam Gillick is one of the four short-listed artists in this year's Turner Prize, nominated for projects such as his recent exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery. Gillick's work has a kinship with design and often takes the form of ambiguous architectural interventions. Mark Sladen met the artist and asked him about Coats of Asbestos Spangled with Mica, 2002, one of the works in Gillick's display at Tate Britain -- and the latest in his series of platforms and screens. The winner of the Turner Prize will be announced on 8th December.

MS: How does this piece relate to your other platforms?

LG: It's a one-off installed work, which does make it less obviously about mobility than the earlier platform pieces. But over time those pieces have come to be seen more as discrete works -- discrete sculptures -- rather than things that have potential and which are contingent on situations. And in this kind of institutional environment, the Tate, I wanted to reduce that as far a possible -- to reduce the extent to which the work could be commodified, without reducing its effect.

MS: It seems to create a different type of space.

LG: It's a more overwhelming and stronger statement than most of the other works of that type, which tend to refer to these "grey area" issues around the play between speculation and planning, around how the near future is controlled -- using words like discussion and negotiation and revision. This piece is proposing a much more performative and theatrical space, where the people in the room are implicated in a different way.

MS: Why was this important?

LG: I felt a strong obligation to use the show to continue my own investigations rather than to parrot or repeat. I was reluctant to simply present discrete sculptural objects, and wanted to raise this issue of the clarification of the work. It suits me better for people to describe this piece as a ceiling -- rather than to describe it as a sculpture, which happened a lot at the Whitechapel. The shift into an everyday vocabulary locates this work back into a built environment rather than an art environment. I wanted to reduce the opportunities for connoisseurship -- and to peel things back a bit.

MS: What is the relationship of the ceiling to the other work in the room?

LG: Well you've also got this big cabinet of designs that relate to things that I'm in the middle of doing. Often I've tried to suggest an environment in which it might be possible to think about something -- a backdrop for the consideration of other questions -- and in this case it literally looms above you while you are considering the details of the more task-orientated work. The ceiling flickers between a thing for consideration and a backdrop, and it's this kind of flickering that is crucial to the work.

Mark Sladen is a curator at Barbican Art Gallery

Turner Prize 2002, until 5 January 2003
Tate Britain, Millbank, London SW1, 020.7887.8000


Image © the artist, courtesy courtesy Corvi-Mora, London

© 2002 KultureFlash Limited