Colm Lally Conversation

Colm Lally is working and living in London. He runs a project space, E:vent Gallery. His art practice is concerned with event, site and document. I spoke with him in his space in Bethnal Green.

'The Beautiful Children', installation part.

In conversation : Catherine Vieira with Colm Lally

Catherine : I am interested in your installation, 'The Beautiful Children' (2008), a porous structure where various performances took place during one month for The Wharf Road Project organised by V22 . Can you tell me a bit more about this project and about the way you developed the work?

Lally : 'The Beautiful Children' is an art installation and programme of events inspired by an image from the beginning of the industrial era, the famous Iguanodon Dinner of 1853. The project attempted to re-animate the dinner that took place inside a life-sized model of an iguanodon dinosaur. The iguanodon was one of a series of dinosaurs created by Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins for the Great Exhibition held in Crystal Palace, London 1854. The image of this dinner, which hosted 20 prominent scientists of the day, captured a celebration of scientific and technological progress in late Victorian period.

I seem to be continuously embedded in many conversations through my work with the gallery, where ideas are continuously manifesting, migrating and transforming, and I usually work with ideas that come up inside this atmosphere. The image of the Iguanodon Dinner came up in a conversation with Gerald Straub, connected to a programme we are working together in E:vent Gallery called Victorian Gardening. At the same time I was invited to participate in a project with V22 that presented ‘20 of the most innovative of London’s contemporary art spaces’. I decided to work with the image of the Iguanodon Dinner for the V22 project and also we thought it would be a good platform to launch the Victorian Gardening programme. This was the beginning point and the original motivation behind taking on the project, but of course working through the project I became consumed by a whole set of new motivations that were triggered by the image itself and just thinking about these protagonists of modernism dining inside the carcass of the extinct animal.

'The Beautiful Children', scene 4.

The first thing I did was construct the carcass. I decided to use strips of red plastic, more commonly found in meat coolers, to create the walls of the stomach. Each strip was screwed to the ceiling along a wooden outline frame that formed the space of the stomach. This porous structure allowed audiences to enter the stomach from any point. I then programmed a series of 6 constructions or scenes, something like a collage of events. At the time I was reading French philosopher Jacques Rancière’s writings on the image. Rancière, observing the power created by the proximity of contrasting logics to reveal one world behind another, relates this notion to the use of montage in the work of filmmaker Jean Luc Godard.


Catherine : What were your intentions for the project?

Lally : Generally I’m interested in the idea of the commons, for example parks, public space where people come together and interact. I became very interested in the iguanodon carcass as a site because it carries intrigue, fantasy.... it provokes strange, interesting ideas and contemplations. I wanted to rethink the space, to build it so i can get inside it and do something.


Catherine : Do you mean you create this installation to simulate a public space?

Lally : I liked also the idea of it is an internal organ, the inside and the outside; you could thing about in many ways. But yes I wanted to open the space to the public.

'The Beautiful Children', scene 3.

Catherine : How does the programming process work for you?

Lally : With this project all the scenes have a feeling of unease, heading towards apocalyptic foreboding. Each of the performances inside the Iguanodon deal with notions around contemporary unease. If you look of the Cyril le Petit performance, referencing Marcel Proust’s Madeleine... he embedded a Viagra pill in the madeleine, and again it’s the undercurrent of loss, of lost youth and sexual vitality. A lot of people felt the installation created a David Lynch atmosphere, with the strong colour of red and strange interior.

'The Beautiful Children', scene 1.

Catherine : How do you embrace the different roles of curator and creator of art in the same show?

Lally : With this project the first event was a dinner and I invited artist group Foreign Investment to host the dinner. What are the conditions under which collaborators operate? I’m not sure. Foreign Investment want to operate independently, so its a grey area where exactly the credits are. I set up the context, the site, the themes and I invite them to operate inside these parameters. Sometimes its difficult with the projects I initiate.... the points of ownership are not clearly established. A different approach would be to dictate what I want exactly and ask actors to perform roles... The artists I work with bring their own ideas to the table and, as I spoke a bit about before, it is the contrast in the logic between the different artists that creates the interest.

Catherine : Is it a collaborative project?

Lally : With all big projects there are many collaborators involved and different parts to the project. So yes it is collaborative, but not really an equal collaboration in the sense that I designed the architecture, I created the programme, I invited the artists and I developed the overall concept that binds the different scenes.
However the work that each artist does inside this context is obviously unique to her/him. I like that these works link to other thinking and projects that each artist is involved in. None of the projects I develop would be possible without the help and creativity of the people around me...
For example, Pol Mclernon did an enormous amount of work in the construction of the installation. Also the project was associated with a drawing exhibition, of the same name, that was co-curated by Joakim Borda and myself... these many different parts form a web of collaboration and exchange, which is really the idea of the commons.