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Your Space Or Mine

New Year, new poster collaboration with artist Mark Titchner: IT’S THE HOPE THAT KEEPS US HERE

Mark Titchner’s art practice takes many and varied forms. He works across a range of mediums: digital print, video (often accompanied by hypnotic, sometimes ear-shocking soundtracks), installation, site specific painting and 3D objects. Much of the artist’s output is situated in the public realm: libraries, hospitals, stations, in the street, even football stadia. In very broad terms an aesthetic thread that continues through the work is the use of enigmatic text combined with arresting pattern.

The last time we crossed paths IRL was at the social enterprise and charity – now sadly closed – House of Saint Barnabas in Soho. Titchner’s show there – titled PAINTINGS WITH WORDS AND PAINTINGS WITH WORDS AND NUMBERS – was an exhibition of exquisite economy. At another extreme, and just to begin to demonstrate the breadth of the artist’s production, Titchner was invited to make work for an ambitious and conscience raising partnership between Hauser & Wirth and mental health changemaking charity Hospital Rooms. LIKE THERE IS HOPE AND I CAN DREAM OF ANOTHER WORLD is a 15m long, almost 6m high mural hand painted on fifty-one plywood panels that has been shown in different venues but is destined to be permanently installed at The River Centre, a new NHS mental health hospital in Norwich. This is an artist whose creative output continually surprises, challenges and with this latest poster work conceivably nurtures passersby. Having collaborated with Mark back in 2020 to display PLEASE BELIEVE THESES DAYS WILL PASS during the pandemic, it’s a pleasure and privilege for BUILDHOLLYWOOD to share Titchner’s work once again, featuring IT’S THE HOPE THAT KEEPS US HERE throughout the UK.

An overarching subject would seem to be addressing and reflecting on the human condition. The range and depth of his work seems to offer up a kind of test laboratory, both proposing and wondering how we communicate, receive and deal with different facets of life’s complexity. In short, it’s a mission to investigate how we think, feel, behave and care for one another. The artist kindly agreed to answer a few questions to explore his creative process in a bit more depth.

15.01.25

Words by Adrian Burnham

What do you enjoy or value about deploying the different mediums and approaches you use? And how do you decide whether and how an idea is to be finally realised?

My practice these days has changed quite a lot from where it was ten or twenty years ago, and I’m less focused on object-making. I suppose my primary methods are working with large-scale digital print and site-specific wall paintings and murals, alongside video works. I do have a little bit of physical studio practice making paintings, which came out of lockdown, but I struggle a bit with making works that don’t have a final location in mind. It’s largely through this location that the work’s meaning is revealed. When this happens, the exciting bit of the process is seeing how the work is received and the dialogue and conversations that are generated. It’s important to me that the works have a degree of ambiguity within them, meaning they can be open to different interpretations or represent different meanings.

As you say, my primary way of doing this is through language, and it can simply be the use of a single word or placing two words next to each other that does this. I suppose I’m interested in the Orwellian possibility that you can simultaneously represent an idea and its opposite at the same time. If that is the case, and we primarily experience the world through the construct of language, things get unstable very quickly. In terms of what gets to be realised, most of what I do is driven by the site I’m working with, so sometimes this can be out of my hands. Sadly, I have a number of projects that I developed over the years and was happy with, that, for various reasons, didn’t or couldn’t happen and, because they were site-specific, can’t exist anywhere else.

It’s been proven that poetry can contribute to the healing process. What effects do you think your installations in hospitals and other caring environments might have on patients?

I think the first thing with this is just to show that these spaces can be something other than simply institutional – just to make them more pleasant to be in for service users and staff. Often, these spaces are, because of the way the NHS has been systematically attacked for decades, poorly maintained after being built cheaply in the first place. The basic idea of working in these spaces is to show some care for them and that they can be less threatening and uninspiring to be in. Thankfully, there are some new-build hospitals, such as Hellesdon, where I have been working recently in Norwich, where design takes on board the lessons that have been learned about how space and design affect those using, living, and working in these environments.

Depending on how things go this year, something that I’m really hoping to work on is a much more researched and detailed study of how people interact with artworks placed in these care environments over longer periods of time. The next stage with these artworks is to think about how far you can go with discussing broader issues about mental health, policy, and history with the institution itself, which is much more difficult to do than just thinking about the benefits of art as being therapeutic.

Your work seems to range from restful, therapeutic to disturbingly apocalyptic and everything in between. What does your practice do for you? Is it reparative or more an outlet for indignation you feel at individual and societal ills?

Yes, it’s true I’m all over the place! It’s always been interesting to me that my work is often regarded as existing within the spectrum of language relating to self-improvement and self-help. While I do frequently draw on this style of writing – often to describe a certain absence of belief or hope – there is usually a subtle shift in the language that, in fact, implies the opposite: a distortion or corruption. For instance, in one work, replacing the word ‘can’ with ‘must’ transforms what might initially appear to be a nurturing or supportive text into something dogmatic or even threatening.

What interests me is that these shifts are often unnoticed by the audience, perhaps because the language of self-help is so pervasive. Is this simply a case of misreading, or is an act of conscious misreading taking place? Are the acts of reading and interpretation pre-programmed, particularly when we are thinking about public spaces?

I have to admit that I do have a kind of shadow practice, which is generally confined to the studio, where I allow myself to make these kinds of fully negative works that are the opposite of any kind of self-help. The kind of things that would be absolutely crushing if anyone actually said them to you! Maybe I find catharsis in allowing myself to do this once in a while rather than feeling I need to keep smiling? The reality is that I feel we must be both indignant and reparative to acknowledge where we really are.

There’s ‘poetry’ but also a keen political edge to your work, clearly so in your community orientated practice but sometimes a message is more directly vociferous (e.g. your recent Glasgow billboard), can you say a bit more about what informs your decisions as the tone and tenor of different works?

I often refer to my work as a representation of the voice. The graphic pitch of an artwork is my attempt to give form to the tone and intonation of that voice – whether it reflects the voice of enraged authority or a child’s whisper. Over the years, I have largely tried to avoid achieving this through the use of illustrative typography, instead focusing on a small palette of common fonts. I think clarity is also really important to me. Although the message might have a fundamental ambiguity, I’m thinking about how I can achieve this in the simplest possible way, in a manner that is accessible to the broadest possible audience.

Essentially, I try to use the simplest words I can – one or two syllables ideally – and to use as few words as possible. Once I have this, I balance it with layout, design elements, scale, and of course site, and this becomes the final tone of the work. I suppose I’m also thinking about how the artwork relates to other uses of text in public spaces, such as instructional signage and advertising.

After all this time, it’s still very much an intuitive process where I’ll bounce a text around until it feels right. Some of the texts have taken years to emerge or have had to wait for the right time to be used. I suppose a previous COVID project with BUILDHOLLYWOOD is a good example of this. Once I have the text, the design aspect is always a process of improvisation, of drawing until there is a balance between the text and image and achieving that correct tone of voice. Sometimes it’s hard to find, and that means going back to the drawing board.

The recent piece in Glasgow was actually a collaboration with a collective called Durty Beanz, who are interested in issues around food justice. They sent me some texts to work with, which we developed into the final billboard. One thing that interested me in the project was working with a vocabulary that wasn’t my usual one. I can’t imagine I would have ever made a work that included the words ‘spittle spatters’ left to my own devices.

By its very nature of often being sited in public spaces, people are going to interact with your art – it’s great to see travellers look up and clock themselves in your hugely spectacular mirrored London Bridge installation – but your work at the Bethlem Royal Hospital was graffitied and yet you seemed to take something positive from that. Why?

Interaction, yes, but most of the time I never know what the experience of the viewer is. I make certain assumptions. I have worked on several longer public engagement projects that have had more detailed analysis of this, though I never trust pure data when it comes to engagement. Does walking past an artwork constitute engaging with it? Probably not. I have worked on quite a few projects where I have interviewed people about their experiences of the public spaces they live in and then made works based on these reactions, which are then placed back into these public spaces in a kind of feedback loop.

The work at Bethlem and the graffiti is a very specific story that had a profound effect on me. Over the last ten years or so, I’ve been involved in a number of projects and initiatives around mental health and art, and this is an ongoing part of my practice. Between 2018 and 2022, I was involved with the Mental Health and Justice project, a multidisciplinary research initiative funded by Wellcome. This project involved collaborating with a team investigating the assessment of mental capacity, particularly in complex or contested cases. I made a number of artworks as part of this project, including a public artwork associated with the initiative that was installed on the perimeter of the Bethlem Royal Hospital.

The artwork, titled Some Questions About Us, was composed of eight mirrored placards, each containing a question about agency and decision-making. The artwork was on-site for a year until one morning, during the height of the UK BLM protests, I got a call from the hospital to say the artwork had been graffitied. This was during lockdown, so I asked the hospital to send me some pictures. Of the eight mirrored placards, seven had been graffitied with the single letters: ‘R-I-P S-E-N-I’. It was immediately clear this wasn’t simply an act of vandalism; it was a protest – a re-voicing of the artwork into something powerful and urgent.

Over the coming weeks and months, I learned the shocking story of the killing of Olaseni Lewis during police restraint at the same hospital ten years earlier. I spoke with Seni’s family and other activists who had lost loved ones to restraint in what should be safe spaces. It was a truly humbling experience, and I met some incredible people I will remember forever. The graffitied artwork went into the collection of the Museum of the Mind. I learned more from making that artwork than I could have ever imagined.

The film, RIP Seni, which explores Olaseni Lewis’s killing and was one of the consequences of the artwork being graffitied, is still viewable for free on the The Guardian website.

Given the breadth of your work to date, is there a medium that you’d like to tackle that you haven’t yet had the opportunity to do so? What would be your ‘dream’ project?

I would like to work on some more print projects this year that use more traditional artisan processes alongside the digitally printed works. I’ve met some incredibly talented printers I’d love to work with and learn from. The other thing that I desperately want to complete is a series of video works. I’ve been thinking about this for a while, and I suppose it’s based on the idea of a digital album, where the videos are different, distinct tracks that lead into each other. I really thought that this would be finished in 2024, but things took their own direction. At the moment, there are probably 4 or 5 finished videos that I am happy with, but I feel like I need double this. The sound on these works is really important and something that I get a lot of enjoyment from developing.

I feel like I’ve already had my ‘dream project’ many times over, so I don’t want to be greedy. That said, I would love to do something at Luton Town’s ground, Kenilworth Road, before they pull it down in a few years’ time. In all honesty, my real ‘dream project’ will be the one thing that I will never do, which is to write a ‘proper novel’, I struggle to put a single sentence together that I’m happy with, so the idea of a ‘real book’ utterly terrifies me!

Finally, given that it seems your art related concerns and inspirations are so wide ranging: music, football, art history, language, social justice, personal realisation… How do you switch off?

The big one for me is reading, but in a way that’s part of my art practice, so maybe that’s cheating. I go to a lot of live music, mainly in small venues such as The Black Heart, the New Cross Inn, and Cafe OTO, and I love being part of that community. I also go and watch a lot of football between my son’s Sunday league team and Luton Town, neither of which is particularly relaxing though! Over the last 7 or 8 years, I’ve become really focused on developing a daily exercise routine, and that’s definitely the space to switch off in. Or switch on, depending on which way you look at it.

Mark Titchner’s artworks combine visual enchantment – be that through videographic magic; expansive, mesmerising static patterning or even the mirrored surfaces that reflected the cold grey sky and trees around Bethlem Royal Hospital – and incisive, often subtly unsettling texts. The poet Paul Farley has talked about how good writing can sometimes be described as ‘language under pressure’ and this would seem to pertain to Titchner’s charged, inquisitive phrasemaking. His body of work is a sustained challenge to, questioning of and meditation on facets of both individual and social experience. Ergo the world is a richer, more nuanced and productively critical place.

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