Audio Transcript: Simon Starling introduction

Verity S:
This is Simon Starling’s room. He’s been shortlisted for the Turner Prize for his sculptural installations - including this large work, Shedboatshed. These installations are the products of meticulous research and careful construction and they often relate to the complex and poetic journeys that he makes around the world.

Here he is talking about Shedboatshed - and as you listen you can walk around the shed and then look inside it too:

SS:
“When you enter the space you come up against the back of a fairly decrepit-looking shed! Which I discovered in a kind of similar way, from the back, when I made a very speculative trip up the river Rhine on a bicycle - and the shed had a paddle on the side, an oar, and I discovered that the oar was for these boats - called ‘Weidling’s - a local design a little bit like a gondola.

And I started to piece together a project which involved dismantling this shed and reconfiguring it temporarily as a boat, a Weidling. So the shed was dismantled and then we used certain sections to build this 10-metre-long boat. Then we loaded the remains of the shed into the boat and made this journey down the Rhine to the museum where my exhibition was happening in Basel. We unloaded the boat, and then rebuilt the shed pretty much as it was 10km up the river.

So as you move around the shed you’ll discover a small door and if you step up into the shed you’ll start to see the cuts, the marks of the boat-building process. Also you’ll discover lying on the floor a pile of cotton caulking which was used to fill the boards to keep the water out, there’s also some steel brackets we used to keep the ribs in place.

And I suppose I deliberately make things myself, by hand, and tend to take the long way round. I mean so much of our contact with the way objects are manufactured is now so distant from us. Because things are manufactured in multiple countries by large corporations and you lose the sense of a connection with the things you’re kind of dealing with every day.” (2’07”)

Verity S:
If you’d now like to hear Simon Starling’s champion, the architect and writer Paul Shepheard, on the philosophy of work he sees in Shedboatshed press 10 and play now. And to hear Turner Prize judge Kate Bush on why Simon’s work - including Shedboatshed - has been nominated for this year’s prize, press 15 and play now.

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Audio Transcript: Paul Shepheard - champion - on Simon Starling

Paul S:
“One of the interesting things about this Shedboatshed is that the thing you’re looking at isn’t the whole work. Now this is always true in conceptual art generally because conceptual art uses its artwork to illustrate some other idea. I think what’s interesting about Simon’s work is that he doesn’t deal in concepts so much as actions - so the work is evidence of action having taken place which is slightly different.

There is an interesting difference between labour and work. The philosopher Hannah Arendt talked about ‘labour, work and action’. And labour, she said, is the things that everybody does all the time just in living their lives: washing themselves, making food for the baby, having sex, this is all labour. The work is when you go out into the world and you take the materials of the world and you turn them into something else, you change it. And action is the politics by which you decide, together, what that work is going to be. Now the coming of machines is what turned us into slaves and turned our work into labour because the machines were doing the work and we were just tightening up the nuts. But in this other idea labour is given a much more gentle and positive aspect. And I think Simon is working in this field; he’s making these distinctions clear.” (1’38”)

Verity S:
If you’d now like to hear Turner Prize judge, Kate Bush on Shedboatshed and why Simon Starling has been nominated for this year’s prize, press 15 and play.

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Audio Transcript: Kate Bush - judge - Simon Starling

Kate B:
"Simon Starling was shortlisted for the Turner Prize this year I think in recognition of a number of important projects. For me one of the really exciting things about his work is the fact that it makes such a celebratory statement about the fact that sculpture ultimately is always about the transformation of one form of material into another form of material. To the critics of contemporary art - many people feel that contemporary artists don’t know how to make anything any more or can’t draw any more - and in a way Simon’s work’s all about making things. And his projects are very wide-ranging but they always involve him acquiring a very difficult and specialist skill in order to make that sculptural transformation.

So I think Shedboatshed is definitely a case in point: there’s a very important sort of ecological, political, and economic questioning going on in his work on one level. But on another level they’re always very beautiful poetic works but there’s also this wonderful absurd kind of circularity. For instance in this piece he found a shed, dismantled it, and turned it into a boat and then turned it back into exactly what it started life as. And you’d say how incredibly pointless! But it isn’t, it’s the imagination and the poetry of doing that absurdist job which at the same time then makes us aware of both of those objects. And he gives you lots of clues and information - not in a didactic way but I think in a very illuminating way - whenever I come to one of Simon Starling’s pieces I always learn something that I didn’t know before and for me that’s a very exciting facet of the work.” (1’40”)

Verity S:
If you’d now like to hear Simon Starling’s champion, architect and writer Paul Shepheard talking about Shedboatshed and the philosophy of work, press 10 and play now.

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