Over the past five years Shaun Doyle and Mally Mallinson have been creating lively art pieces and themed exhibitions using humour and large-scale modelling to critique traditionalism and interrogate received wisdom. Matt Rowe met up with the crack team in their East London studio to talk about evolution, neon and German souvenirs.
Is your partnership like a marriage or a job - or both?
Mally - I think we have too much fun for it to be a job –
Shaun - or a marriage. Oh no, I wasn’t going to say that.
Do you make stuff in the same way? Is it like a production line?
S - Look around you. Does it look like a production line?
M - It looks like a junk yard.
So, do you say “you do that now, it’s your turn?”
S - There is a bit of “God, I’m sick of this, can you finish this one?”
M - Sometimes there’ll be a piece which only one of us has touched. We’ve talked about it and, you know it’s not like cutting a wedding cake, holding hands or whatever, when you’re making a piece you just do what has to be done, that’s all.
Whoever gets to the studio first?
M - Yeah. Whoever’s not in the pub. We’re generally in the pub together though aren’t we?
What’s your next show?
M - Ecce Homo Tesco, at the Airspace Gallery in Stoke-on-Trent.
S - A lot of the ground around the gallery has been levelled and lots of property demolished to build this super-massive Tesco. That instantly became the theme for the show.
M - It’s kind of like a faux museum reconstruction isn’t it?
S - Yeah, sort of shoddy. Your old school regional museum feel. It’s a darkened room with spot-lit pieces, reconstructions of archaeological finds on landforms, displays.
There’s three main pieces: a skeleton carrying plastic bags, a child skeleton pushing a trolley and two kiddie skeletons on a concrete block waving flags. In the second room we’re going to make a sort of shanty town from the trolleys and some tarpaulin and then there’s a room at the back where we’re going to show some videos.
Sounds like quite a lot!
M - We’ll ram it in! The building’s an old bank – it’s got that regional museum feel hasn’t it?
S Yeah, it’s fitting. It’s all terracotta and tiles so it’s quite nice. There needs to be some engagement with a place – it adds an extra dimension, the piece is enriched from that.
M - I think you should mention the tescum, tesci.
S - Oh yeah. After we decided the show was going to be called Ecce Homo Tesco, I thought, I wonder if Tesco is any sort of Latin word… tescum, the plural of which is tesci, is desert or wasteland. The serendipity of that is fantastic isn’t it?
M - Things like that always crop up once you start making pieces. The ideas set to a degree but then it evolves further along certain lines. You need to keep it open.
What was your last show?
M - We were in a group show in Berlin called Das Unheimlich – The Uncanny. Before that we installed Ecce Homo Erectus, Behold the Erect, The Upright Man, in Venlo, a very old, very Catholic part of Holland, down south on the German border near the Rhine.
S - [It was] a huge skull with a crown of thorns on the front of the Venlo Town Hall. A Homo erectus skull that would have looked quite good outside a Goth nightclub.
M - With a neon title at the top that said “Behold the Upright Man.”
S - That was a piece based on DuBois, who found the missing link, Homo erectus. He’s buried in that city but he’s not very well known there at all.
M - He’s kind of faded into obscurity and we wanted to do a little homage to him. It caused a bit of controversy, I think. It’s that debate between creationists and evolutionists we’d explored in past works such as Tanky Monk.
That was your first use of neon wasn’t it?
M - Made neon, yeah. We’ve used bought neon before. We strapped some neon onto a few [pieces in] Black Forest Ghetto to lighten it up a bit ’cos it was so dark and depressing, but that didn’t really work to lighten the mood.
S - It just made it moodier.
M - Seedier.
S - Any sense of joy drained away.
You drained the joy from neon.
M - Yeah! That’s quite a hard thing to do and we achieved it.
page 1 2
