Interview with Greig Burgoyne and Elisabeth Sonneck: Negotiations

Jo Manby

In anticipation of the two-person exhibition, ‘Negotiations’, at PAPER Gallery, Jo Manby spoke to its collaborating artists, Elisabeth Sonneck and Greig Burgoyne, based in Berlin and Hastings respectively, about their rules-based, process led work. Sonneck occupies the whole of PAPER with a site-specific, paper and paint-based installation. Burgoyne fills PAPER2 with new work, The Clearing. This comprises by-products of the live performance of the same name that will take place in PAPER’s courtyard area, 7pm Friday 5 November. The performance will then be presented as a film and installation for the duration of the exhibition, which runs from 6 November to 17 December 2021. In the following three-way interview, the collaborators reveal the types of negotiations with self-imposed rules and paradoxical states that permeate their work.

Jo Manby: What are you planning to show at PAPER Gallery? Will there be a performance?

Greig Burgoyne: Heidegger spoke about the idea of clearings, this is like an opening up, where artworks reveal their being, form the things they are not. Artworks play this game of oscillating between an exterior aesthetic we meet, and as a situation that is concealed, we sense.

I’ve been making a series of works called The Clearing. They are drawings, but between drawing as thing and as an event. They are based around the idea of reiterating a supports surface. This is with tape, so I cover the support (various sizes of paper) in tape (as line), but as the paper is flexible it changes shape, i.e.: from a rectangle to an indistinct form. Once the whole sheet/form is drawn on (covered) it is complete. The outcome is the event of a drawing taking place. In reiterating that thing’s surface, its form mutates. The (quite pathetic looking) forms that are revealed as a result exist perhaps in a fugitive state, of being an undercurrent of something we don’t know, i.e.: concealed. Any attempt to unravel the resulting form would destroy that possibility of clarification.

The Clearing, as such, is an exploration of the paradoxes of interior an exteriority. I am intending to present this as live performance on the opening night and subsequently as residual installation and film for the duration of the show.

Jo Manby: When did you first learn of Greig’s work and how will your practice combine with Greig’s in ‘Negotiations’?

Elisabeth Sonneck: We met first at Electro Studios Project Space in St Leonards-on-Sea where I realised a site-specific paper installation in 2019. In subsequent, dense discussions, we discovered surprising similarities in our work (process-orientated strategies, the frequent use of simple materials, the site+time specific basis of work) as well as clear differences in the type of realisation. Since I am very fascinated by Greig's work, I invited him to show the video Bad drawing/paper cell in the exhibition ‘Papier sculptural’ which I curated in Oberhausen/Germany in 2020.

In ‘Negotiations’ we look forward to further exploring the inherent tension in the similarities and differences between our two works. I am very excited!

JM: How would you define process-led rule-based strategies in your work and how did you arrive at that set of methods?

GB: The strategy of working with rules emerged gradually from the large-scale wall drawings I was making a few years ago, as a means to depart from any instinctual rationale or critique of the work, as such it also removes my authority from the evolution of the works. I like this as I don’t think ‘feeling this/feeling that’ is measurable or helpful to my desire to bring a rigorous conceptually driven practice to the paradoxically unstable situation that results.

Rules when intensified unravel, they orchestrate an outcome you won’t know until you have followed them, I like this collision of anticipation and expectation. The work, not consciously, has an absurdity to it, like life, if you can’t laugh about it, you’d cry. Following rules is pretty logical to most, except the rules I impose on myself or collaborators intensify boundaries and the synchronicities that result. In doing so, largely entropic and paradoxical outcomes result. I’m very attracted to these paradoxes that are revealed. Life is a paradox.

JM: What led to your interest in exploiting the material quality of paper in your work?

ES: As a painter starting from the ‘picture’, I was always searching for methods to show my practice as procedural and as non-hermetical as possible. This led me first to multilayered long, freehanded, staggered brushstrokes with the emphasis on physical work and the development of colour nuances and spectra, beyond monochrome values.

Since 2006, I have realised murals and paper installations to activate the place as an equal partner. I am deeply interested in all dialogic modes. Paper opens many threads for this: flexible forms triggered by the material tension, its fragility associated with transience, its fundamental relationship with cultural development, its preciousness of simple materiality. Paper, more than any other material, enables genuine fluidity in work, and I am increasingly fascinated by all non-solid manifestations.

JM: What kinds of dialogue are opened up through your interrogation of your materials? Are you in confronting absurdities and pushing boundaries?

GB: I play with materials, openly and speculatively. Often following from a previous work, the ideas evolve through that curiosity and risk. They are cheap and ubiquitous, but also hopefully elevate a status from utility and the banal to epiphany.  Absurdity isn’t something you can plan; I do logical things in intensive if unorthodox ways. Boundaries are opened, fluid and fluctuating. I’m working on a performance piece at the moment, in which a group of people are inside a moving boundary but don’t know it. In another project it’s a large-scale collaborative performance about the paradox between the limits of seeing and not possessing something, versus when you have that thing, you can’t see it.

JM: I was interested to read that you studied sculpture. How does paper-based work and colour enable you to explore space and concepts that other modes of making art might not?

ES: Basically, I prefer material haptics and analog work. In the literal sense of ‘touch’, it refers directly to the level of body, material, space. Paper enables me to connect the material with my movement so that flexible sculptures merge with the particularities of the space in mostly fragile constellations. Colour is something unmeasurable, a psychic as well as a physical energy.

Both together gives a maximum of corporeality that includes the impermanence of things, a concept that also includes the recycling of paper through the metamorphosis of forms. The same sheet of paper can be installed as floor work or as a hanging spiral, or vice versa; it can assume a flat-spread shape as well as the maximally compressed, rolled-up cylinder shape, and countless shapes in between - conjunctive instead of crystalline solidity.

I can't realise this dynamic in any other medium, and I don't want to show myself, I want the situation and things to speak for themselves – and always in colour.

JM: Can you tell me about the impact of modern Russian fiction on your work? I saw that you mention it as an influence. I wondered about the link between your 2017 Bad drawing/paper cell work for The Prison Drawing Project at Scarborough Jail and the transformational power written into contemporary Russian fiction such as that of Mikhail Shishkin, for example, who writes about a prisoner drawing a boat on his cell wall and one day stepping inside it and sailing away.

GB: I’ve always had a fascination with Russia, I’ve taught in universities there, exhibited there and Russian is one of the languages I speak. Russian fiction immerses you in a stark if absurd logic, a healthy scepticism of convention, and magical escapism. Krzhizhanovsky, Pelevin, Kharms, Ronshin, Platonov and soviet era sci-fi are some of those influences. These writers were scientists, engineers and philosophers. They wrestle with the real as unreal, unreal as real. In Russia, people will say if you want to know what’s going on, don’t watch the news, watch the soaps. Often about our relationships to space, Bad drawing and other works such as Quadraturin (2017) come out of these stories. The latter, Quadraturin, after a story of the same name by Krzhizhanovsky that tells of a man living in a tiny flat who gets sold a potion that will make the cramped room he is allocated by the state bigger, but from the outside it won’t be any different in scale or appearance. The result is the interior space doesn’t stop growing and he dies lost in space, a desire for more living space can indeed be deadly. This led to playing with the means in which we measure space, in doing so seek to contain it, to me, this is one of the many ways we can activate drawing.

JM: Your work seems to aspire to different dimensions from the standard 2D and 3D of our everyday lives. Do you think about astrophysical or quantum mechanical concepts in relation to your work, or is it more about pushing the boundaries of art itself?

ES: When immersing myself in paintings in museums or wherever, I experience the incredible power of 2D reality which is implemented in our familiar 3D world; an interface between inner and outer world. Spatial artworks add a specific experience that emphasises the viewer’s individuality. Each view provides changing facets from the whole which depend directly on the movement of the viewer. This fact offers the awareness of the here and now, of flowing time, mortality and all other limits that affect life.

Boundaries can be shifted from inside, through perception, reflection, discussion – ultimately through being touched by art. So, I take astrophysical concepts at their word – like Einstein’s Curved Space-Time. That was the title of my solo show in Kunming/CN in 2018, related to the unity of space-time in the gravity-related material curves of site-specific paper installations. It is always interesting for me to test the language literally - like things physically, and to experiment with all types of spaces, institutional and artist-run spaces, abandoned places or in public space.

JM: Reading about your work, I was struck by the number of repetitious activities involved. Are you critiquing not just repetition in, say, the production line sense, but all of us, every day? Our need for food and water for example. How we fund it, many of us by working in an office – using the same materials, pushing them around a bit differently maybe but effectively desk bound. Is your work a critique of the human condition and is it pessimistic or optimistic or neutral?

GB: Many viewpoints exist around repetition, and these are interesting. The Deleuzian notion of endless difference etc., the post-Fordist idea of work being a performance (Paulo Virno/ Franco Berardi) we never escape, and the role of habit that Merleau-Ponty and Husserl spoke about as both as a sedimentation indicative of constraint and liberation.

In the works I make, such as Pier Dig (2018), I dig and move an area of sand on a beach where a pier stood for a whole day. The area of sand is a site, a site of memory that the sea is seeking to wash away. The work concludes when I can’t tell the difference between the sand I am moving, and the sand on the beach. So yes, they exhibit endurance, repetition and accumulation, but these are not the main drivers for the work, as I don’t think those strategies or actions have enough going for them on their own, to make a work ‘work’. The conceptual framework is vital, shifting back and forth between philosophical and theoretical positions as ideas to wrestle with, and the playing (and I mean playing) in the studio with materials and actions that bring intrigue and discovery, revealing a paradox not a confirmation of that intent.

If there is accumulation and repetition it’s simply a means to advance that agency of doing as thinking, not only thinking then doing. Repetition can only be intriguing when there’s synthesis between how and with what that repetition happens. There are reverberations on daily life, routine, but it’s not consciously so, that’s for the viewer to expand upon, it’s not the main thing on my mind in the emergence of the work.

Also, the works are only realised when they are presented, I don’t rehearse it and practice it etc. When it’s performed, it’s more or less for the first time, that gives it an edginess and tension which is important.

JM: Do you see your work as accessing a form of spiritual energy?

ES: As easy as difficult... Art is definitely the same as spiritual energy regardless of the time or place it occurs. Following this trail, I hope to be able to contribute. I hope to open up an expanded and immersive view of what ‘materiality’ and ‘space’ could be, in its flexible transformations and its transience as well as in its colour and the associated emotional resonance. The (unanswerable) question, of course, is what is spiritual... it arises through the activity of the viewer and is always a personal, unique experience.