Sven Christian [SC]: To make the maquette for Fissure (2016), it looks like you used slate as a substrate and then modelled it that way, to build up the idea for the work. Could you walk me through its making, from the initial thought, to the maquette, through to the final work?

Michele Mathison [MM]: Yes, sure. It was made for NIROX’s Winter Sculpture Exhibition, A Place in Time, in 2016. I’d been looking at ideas around land excavation and mining — prospecting — and was interested in the tension between exploration and some destructive or creative force; between extracting something from the ground, some mineral, and the impact of that excavation. Not just in terms of mining, but in general: the land as a platform for humankind. We’re in constant relation to it — building, planting, etcetera — so I started to play with this idea of piercing the ground. At the same time, the work began to resemble a spurt or some kind of explosion out of the ground. The title, Fissure, is a geological reference, but it also refers to a divide. You have something that’s split in two, so two sides of the coin or fence. At the time I was also researching archaeological extraction: artefacts that were stolen or removed. I was thinking about it in relation to archaeological sites in Zimbabwe, Great Zimbabwe, and the story of the Zimbabwe Birds, which were found by colonial treasure hunters in the early-1800s and removed from their archaeological site and taken to the UK and South Africa. Post-independence, in Zimbabwe, the birds were returned, but they had been physically extracted. The stones were sunk into the ground with the birds on top, and were cut out of the ground, stolen. I’d also just made Breaking Ground (2014), the stop-motion of pick-axes going into the earth. This was, by extension, the motion of a guala; this kind of crowbar that you dig into the ground to make holes.

SC: Yes, there’s definitely a shared sense of repetition and movement, which wouldn’t be the case if Fissure were comprised of a single pole. The effect would be a lot less violent, perhaps.

MM: Yeah, exactly. Maquettes are quite a common occurrence in my practice, to model works on a small scale and get a 3D representation. I don’t really work that much with 3D software. If I can physically make it, I prefer to do that.

SC: What is the benefit of that to you?

MM: It gives you a sense, not only of the form, but the construction. In the case of Fissure, for example, how to physically weld it. If you look at the maquette, those pieces of steel are welded together, so you get a sense of the connecting points; the physics of the work.

SC: All the way down to attaching it to some kind of heavy base.

MM: I just work better that way. It’s a very direct way of understanding the physics, engineering, and construction, so I try to mimic the maquette manufacturing as closely as possible.

SC: Do you have a lot of maquettes that have not been realised?

MM: I do, actually. A lot don’t materialise because, when making the maquette, you realise that technically it would be very, very complicated to make. When you start to understand the weights... I guess it’s the moment where the idea either grows legs or dies.

SC: So if you’re unsure how to do something, you might put it down and return to it later, or if you haven’t got the funds...

MM: Or the right opportunity. I’ve got a great library of small works.

SC: When it comes to Fissure, were you approached to conceptualise and make a work for exhibition or did you already have the maquette, and this was its time?

MM: No, it was made for exhibition. I didn’t have the maquette yet.

SC: How much deviation was there in the process, and are there significant material shifts that took place? When you’re making maquettes generally, are you happy to work with substitute materials that share similar properties, or is it important for you to use the same materials in your maquettes?

MM: There’s no rule of thumb. I think I have made some maquettes in wood and then transferred them into steel, or vice versa. It’s obviously quite valuable to replicate using the same material, but it’s not something that I feel I have to stick to. But when you start to work at that scale, you do encounter technical and physical constraints. You have to start working with other people, too, so you’re not entirely in control. You can make a maquette in your studio, but when you scale it up you often have to get outside help. With Fissure, we had to make a couple of changes which, in the end, were a bit of a compromise. The work didn’t come out exactly the way I wanted it to. One often has to make compromises, be it in terms of the budget, what’s physically possible, transport, how to put it in the ground... That kind of thing. A lot of it has to do with budgets, though. If you had an open cheque you could make the work out of bronze, spend two years making it, and all that kind of thing, but for large parts of that process you are slightly restricted. In the end, Fissure was successful in terms of what I wanted to achieve, visually and in terms of the scale. It was also the first. I’m sure if I made another one, as happens quite often, I would say that that large work is more of an artist’s proof. If I have the opportunity to make another, it would have more of a lean and
be manufactured slightly differently.

SC: Ndoro (2019), your other work in the park, also involves a lot of straight poles, this time rebar and equally spaced. The variation in height creates this sense of a spiral or curve, but here movement is created through audience participation. I find it quite dizzying.

MM: Yeah, it’s a strange sensation, which I wasn’t expecting. I’d never made a work like that before. I was expecting it to be more meditative, but it does feel quite claustrophobic in the middle.

SC: Compared to Ndoro, the poles in Fissure are very still, but the repetition creates movement.

MM: It is interesting to see the difference in the physical dynamics of the two works in the park. Fissure is very static and more monumental.

SC: I grew up playing a lot of Pick-up Sticks. Fissure also has that quality — the moment you release the pick-up sticks, you know?

MM: Yeah, Fissure does have great tension. You do feel it. I just felt I could have heightened that a bit more. At the end of the day, I felt it was a little bit too vertical, and that the poles were a little bit too close together.

SC: Are all poles the same length, or do they vary? And can you talk about the choice of black?

MM: It’s the normal colour of those digging poles or gualas, so that was a direct translation, in terms of colour. And yes, because of that, they’re all the same length. The idea was to replicate the idea of one pole being held up and then thrust into the ground.

SC: That makes sense. There’s another work by Moataz Nasr, not too far from Fissure, called Sun Boat. For me, there’s an interesting dialogue that happens between the two.

MM: Definitely. Sun Boat’s a very, very beautiful work.

SC: It’s not something that I’ve raised with any of the other artists, but that sense of having these maquettes that are unrealised or that sit dormant for a while...

MM: Funnily enough, I don’t know if you were aware, but I made a work called Refuge at NIROX in 2014. It was this installation of white tents on the field by Gate 1 parking, where you come in when you have your events. It was a field of refugee tents, without any doors or windows. I made the maquette and then made the work, but the work only lasted a couple of weeks and it started to fall apart. It was always going to be temporary, but it really got hammered by the wind, so the only things that remain now are some images and the maquette, which I keep in the studio. It’s a metre by metre board with these small model tents on it.

SC: Oh wow, I didn’t know that. I’d love to see pictures of the maquette and the installed work. As with Farieda’s The Spectacle Lure (2023), I find it appealing, in a kind of full circle way, that the maquette has survived the work.