Artist Ruairidh Wilkinson

interview with Ruairidh

Click the birds for enlarged images

Tell us a bit about your background, beliefs, experiences etc

I am in fact Edinburgh born, which the city’s heckling neds
(that’s chavs for those down south) are clearly unable to tell. My
accent is now can’t-quite-tell-but-definitely-south-east-england,
and shows no signs of reverting to its Scottish roots. It is a fact
that English people get a certain amount of stick while living in
Scotland.

I’ve just quit my job at the National Museum of Scotland, and
something I learned there was how lucky a small country like
Scotland is to have a resource like that – somewhere people can go
to find out about their national identity and how it’s a part of
them. It’s also full of examples of how a combination of patriotism
and ignorance have scarred the history of a nation. The museum tells
the story, in bits, of the nation, and how it goes through this
cycle of, in a word, periods in which ideas begin to be allowed to flow more freely before being crushed beneath newly fledged fears of those ideas.

I think it’s widely agreed that we’re going through the latter of
those two phases at the moment. Xenophobia has a huge amount to do
with that. This is not a point which it is generally possible to
discuss with heckling neds.

One of the best things I saw at the festival was a piece of
physical theatre by the name of And Even My Goldfish at the C venue
on Northbridge. It was the harrowing tale of a young man haunted by
his inner demons; the central character was played by this enormous
guy who’s paranoid delusions were personified by several much
smaller actors who at times climbed all over him without exerting
upon him any force great enough to move him more than you’d imagine
someone’s own panic might at a moment of extreme angst.
I could not say anything about the Edinburgh Fringe without
mentioning Dr. Robert’s Magic Bus, which was parked at the foot of
Middlemeadow walk, and hosted such events as Charlie Murphey’s
Kiss-in-burgh, where the artist convinced members of the public to
make alginate casts of their kisses, Chris Dobrowlski’s Landscape,
Seascape, Skyscape, Escape; an inspired lecture about the joys of
art college, and various modes of transport which he created in
attempts to escape it (such as a tank, a hovercraft and a flying
flea!), and a charismatic piece of durational performance by Holly and Ben, involving a month’s worth of TV dinners.

We are displaying your smoking birds in this issue of Creature-mag, please tell us a bit about the origins and development of this project.

I begin by stumbling across something about which it seems incredible that I’d never really thought before. That’s how all my ideas come about really. In the case of my smoking contraptions I
started looking at vortices, at how they form by absorbing excess
energy in gasses and liquids which has nowhere else to go but swirl
around and in on itself. They occur whenever something moves through
air or water, but are often impossible to see. When a bird flaps its
wings innumerable vortices spiral off invisibly in all directions,
as when anything moves suddenly in air or water. Smoke-rings are an
example of a vortex made visible by an opaque substance, and I soon
realized that it was not difficult to make devices that would blow
smoke-rings. There is a real history of smoke-rings; it is the obscure history of something ephemeral which has no purpose, which
often occurs naturally – unintentionally or unnoticed or, at its
most intriguing, as a picturesque accompaniment to a break in
conversation.

Initially I was thinking about existing applications for smoke –
particularly as involved in ceremony. I talked to people about smoke
as a metaphor for transcendence beyond the physical world – I’m not
really religious, but ideas about spirituality can’t help finding
their way into the core of whatever it is I’m working on, and those
ideas fit comfortably with what I’d been thinking about vortices. I
made a series of devices for blowing smoke rings, each based on a
device I’d seen for use in some other smoke-related activity. I gave
demonstrations of each of those devices in action. I invented a
false historical necessity for the creation of smoke-rings.
I then began to think about a false biological necessity for smoke
rings, which is where my smoking birds come from. I had been looking
at creatures whose existence seemed so improbable because of the
complexity of their lifecycle, or because they appear completely
ill-equipped for survival, yet survive nonetheless. When compared to
some of the things which survive on this planet is it really so
strange that a genus of birds should have evolved which are blind
and do nothing but blow smoke-rings to sustain their existence?
Perhaps! Yet still stranger things exist, stranger even than some of
the impossible creatures which have been believed to exist, are
believed to exist. I made these smoking birds to mock something
about the way things achieve believability, or get dismissed as
impossible.

These birds have been exhibited in an exhibition entitled Aviary,
as part of the Leith festival, and also at Art in the Mall, as part
of the Edinburgh Fringe at the Ocean Terminal, which I will take
this opportunity to condemn as a crap establishment.
Most of them are currently cluttering my parent’s house in Kent. I am a great believer in moving on and not dwelling on old work –
exhibiting takes a lot of time and energy which is best reserved for
doing new stuff, which is why they will probably continue to clutter
my parent’s house for some time, since I currently have no other
home. Sorry Mum & Dad!

I did a performance this July in Germany as part of a festival called Kultur Sommer am Kanal (Summer of Culture on the Canal). It was called Emergence from a Pupa: I was attempting to enact the emergence of a butterfly from a pupa. The pupal casing itself was stitched together from tarpaulin type material suspended on a sort of rope ladder/trapeze construction. After it has squeezed itself headfirst from the pupal casing, a butterfly must pump fluid from a swollen gland in its abdomen into its wings to inflate them. To represent this I used a rubber boat, which I inflated as I squeezed myself out of the pupa, then I paddle off down the
canal in it. It takes about 25 minutes. This performance played on various themes, also related to improbable survival tactics: the larva discards all its limbs and its head, including its sensory apparatus, and just waits patiently to complete its metamorphosis, hoping it won’t be found in that vulnerable state, with no means of defence, except for its outer casing and sometimes a cocoon, or escape.

I was intrigued by the idea that they give themselves up to the
mercy of nature for some time in order to complete the transformation into their adult form. I thought I’d give it a try. Admittedly I’ve noticed no obvious transformation in myself as a result.

I've actually left Edinburgh for the time being, with no definate
plans for going back. I'm off to India for a few months, firstly to
do some voluntary work at the Nek Chand Rock Garden in Chandigarh,
helping fix sculptures, that sort of thing.

I'm not sure about the question of reincarnation, and what I may
have been in a previous life. The fact is that my memory is
appauling at the best of times and it just doesn't go back that far.
Perhaps India will be a good place to go to at least have a
crack at some of those questions.