How did this show come about?
They asked for me to do and show and I said “okay great”. What I usually do, is that I don't know what I’m usually gonna do. I initially wanted to do a life size figure that you could smoke, and it would sit in the middle of the room and fill up with smoke when people were smoking. That was completely unaffordable— and didn’t make sense for the space, but it was good because that’s where the process began. Sometimes limitation in space is good because it helps you do something you wouldn’t have done.
What’s with the relationship with smoke?
Like a body, these [pipes] are vessels in a way. I made them clear, to be conscious of when you use them, you can see what’s going through them. This idea of using these to escape because you don't want to be present. Or because you need to be somewhere else in terms of a psychological space.
Is there some implication that the smoke is toxic?
No. It's just about being a body. Things go through, escaping, being outside of your head.
Was inspired by anything else? Why each word, was there a reference to something?
Thinking about the power of language... Words like fuck or dick are very ‘aggressive’ words. But when you put them in glass, it just softens the heaviness of the word. What language does, it's not just the word, it's visual. Before we put these up, we just printed the words in black and put them on the wall— and it was way too much. But then when we started to put the glass up, it was so much better, it softened them.
