1/2 Yinka Shonibare - What Do Artists Do All Day ?

you you as an artist your your trained get your audience you you know you want them to be interested in what you're doing beauty is one way in of course Linda the work can be dark as well you is there any kind areas they will find that later but it's important to kind of get people's attention you when I was young because and I lived in Nigeria we used to come to learn and so much for the summer holidays and and we used to go to traffic the square to fill the pigeons so when I was asked to them put my work in Trafalgar Square I thought you know that was awesome it just kind of brought back in a childhood memories but I except this time all the pigeons were in a gone after disappeared I think and even still got rid of them but um I remember when I used to be able to go down there feed them and the essay was yeah that provide memories been having that might work there um I mean I like the fact that you know you can just look at a work of art you don't have to know anything about it you don't have to be the kind of person who goes to galleries and you know you can have a conversation about it and I've been particularly you know I guess excited or moved by the way that cab drivers know everything about what goes on on the fourth plinth and everyone's got an opinion and that's actually very interesting really I mean only in London you know you know cab drivers arguing with you about what they like what they don't like you know often it asked me you know what do you do and I'll say I'm an artist and they'll say oh you know is it watercolors or oils how's it ah well did you see the ship-in-a-bottle in Trafalgar Square like oh yeah so you've done that so yeah yeah I do that well I think it's just good when art you know when everyone can just have a conversation about art and see that you know it's just part of in a normal life it doesn't have to be like elitist or anything so that's you know why I enjoy actually putting my works in public so I'm Jane is rather serial piece I'm doing a sketch of this kind of man celebrating and it's got all these balloons pulling him up so so that's a balloon man I'm actually doing say it's a kind of a slightly surreal but also fun piece about you know celebrating something and you know being maybe over indulging perhaps do you maybe when I was maybe when I was a little bit younger but I don't think you can be a very successful at what you do feel not focused because you feel if you're always drunk and drugged out you you're not going to know what you're doing you can read your own estudio if you're like that so you do have to be quite disciplined actually to be honest is it's it's a myth our artists are some of the most disciplined people around because they can't run their studios otherwise you you we get the sketch from Janka and you try and get the flavor of what he's trying to get across and this is it a guy who's been lifted off the floor by balloons it's an ideal pose of what somebody would look like being pulled up by balloons but when you try and do that pose for real you can't do it so you have to do it in in real life with people hanging from the ceiling on ropes and that way you get a better idea of what the pose is actually going to be like which is more like this one he's based that on some of our images that we've done from life and out of about 300 poses the overall winner was this one which was me doing the pose in that instance so that's how it gets refined down to the actual pose that we're going to sculpt from he gives a lot so he's easy to get into the head off and he's very very good at communicating what it is he wants and he has a definite palette of materials colors etc and ideas that he likes to use they're anonymous figures kind of a bit everyman like the only thing that's often detailed is the hands and these we cast from life the rest of the bodies are like a shop mannequin body what anonymous look in why do you think he likes I think that's part of the magic of it if you start putting a likeness onto a figure it becomes a sculpture of someone rather than an abstract sculpt of a figure he likes to end up with a finished sculpture that's magical when you look at it it's got a char and a whimsy and a magical quality you you my work got really political sigh I was making work about what was going on in Russia at that time perestroika and then I one of my teachers said in a why aren't you making authentic Africa now and I just didn't know what he meant by that really and so I kept trying to find out what authentic African at ease you know somebody who was born in London but then grew up in Lagos Nigeria but also in a very kind of cosmopolitan city I didn't quite understand why I had to gee you know traditional I'm African ah so I went to Brixton markets where I found the fabrics and then they said the fabrics are Indonesian influenced fabrics produced by the Dutch and then for sells to the African market but I always imagined that the fabrics were authentically African so I thought I was I thought the story was quite interesting and then that's kind of how I started to incorporate the fabric into my work I mean I've got in I've got a disability and I do have some physical restrictions and I first I wanted to do in a large abstract pictures but then I thought actually it'll be quite difficult for me to do that and also conceptually I'm a lot of abstract paintings were made by in a sort of in a white men and I decided to actually challenge that and produce something that's got lots of patterns from the market and it's no higher its popular culture and you know and then I've kind of fragmented this sort of huge sort of been a white male ego into this sort of tiny you know tiny canvases so that's kind of why they ended up you know looking like that and I guess that's sort of whether use of the fabric started and then you know subsequently I started to use the fabrics in the costumes as well all the figures are three fabrics so you get a light the dark and a medium one or hot cold medium and then he kind of leads it up to us to who leads up to me to choose which how I use it so what I've done is cut out the section that actually will be visible in the garment when it's made up because some bits are sort of hidden because of the cut and I'm just moving it around till I get a piece that looks like it might work in the garment and with the colors of the underlying pieces you know the waistcoat and shirt underneath but this one is quite quite a varied you know varied colors but I find quite often if I don't think about it and just move this around and then one bit will just be more pleasing than another and that's which what you go for of the art film advance I just got a whack under the iron yeah you can take it off what's great is that there's a lot more sort of artistic freedom here for me as a maker because I can you know I'm given the fabrics and then I can work with them and do what I like with them which is a really lovely way to work I'm kind of used to before that having to have you know as a lot of stopping and starting and having things checked by designers and changes made so it's really lovely to have the sort of flow of being able to just decide what you're going to do and work it through and know that you know that you're trusted to do that it's um getting there it's um will suddenly turn into a coat with sleeves hopefully yes you feel like you're kind of not getting anywhere when things are in bits and everything has to be kept what a lot of elements have to be kept separate right until the end and then it comes together fairly near completion and just when you think kill you're not going to be done in time and it starts to happen um yeah I mean you know when when I was 19 I got the virus in my spine she left me completely paralyzed it's called transverse myelitis and I have obviously in I use a wheelchair now I wasn't using a wheelchair for a few years but I you know I managed I have developed ways working you know I have other people help me produce things negative in a very heavy work but you know I can't paint and draw and I can draw what I want so I can describe what I want and draw it if I need to but yeah but it's not actually stopped my work I find it really difficult to figure out how my work would be different actually if I didn't have some of the physical difficulty

Channel: Art Documentaries

Views: 38,225

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Keywords: Yinka Shonibare - What Do Artists Do All Day ?

Id: xjHAPRoBwLA

Length: 15min 0sec (900 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 20 2016