Sven Christian [SC]: Small Things focuses on how artists create models or experiments before arriving at “the thing.”

Dean Hutton [DH]: I’ve still got the models I made in residence. I was going to float the original, but decided not to because I thought it was a good archival object. I also have the open maquette that’s going to get basket weaved. I put it into the pond to soften the willow, which has formed roots and started growing. It’s floating on the water.

SC: I remember you experimenting with two approaches to make the skeleton or body: one from bamboo, sourced here, which was quite small. Then there was a larger one, made from welded steel that had been found here and repurposed. You also kept reference images taped to the studio wall, coupled with the 3D-renders you’d made, to help visualise what it might look like in the dam.

DH: My thinking is a lot clearer now, particularly around my collaboration with nature; remembering that we are also nature. I feel like we have become so disconnected through our education, through living in capitalism. the way that nature has only got value if it can be exploited... In “Labour, Work, Action” (1958), Hannah Arendt writes about how nature has become an asset. We’re taken off the land, and our labour is used as work to support industrial processes, severing the link between humans as a manifest part of nature. Much like what happens to nature, everything that we do — including our creative process — becomes just another material which we invest into objects, and through which we remove our agency in the means of production. Our labour is exploited by ruling classes, so there’s a transmutation of the process, and of material into object.

SC: In the artist statement for this project, Floating Bodies (2024 – ongoing), you italicise / emphasise the work in artwork. Interestingly, Arendt distinguishes between work and labour by referring to the work of the hand versus the labour of the body. The former has ties to the object, the artwork (something that “lasts”), whereas the latter is associated with the cyclical and metabolic — with one’s body, reproduction, the seasons, farming...

DH: Work is also externalised as exploitative practice, right? You’re told to work, you’re observed working, and you’re told to invest your labour in the production of something that is also going to end up in the landfill. I’ve exhibited on shows where they don’t even name the artist, so the objects are disconnected from the artist and their labour. They’re just in the room as objects. I’m so uncomfortable with how my work, which involved a really intense material engagement, can become so absolutely disconnected from me.

My process involves a lot of physical labour. Everything I produce requires a painful exchange. Then my work is presented and there’s no seating. So they want the contemplative meditative moment, but don’t provide access for people who are disabled, like me, to engage my own work, to inhabit that meditative state. They don’t think deeply enough about what that exchange means to respect what the work is doing, and it’s such a pity. I also still continue to be misgendered in conversations, presentations, and walkabouts.

Sometimes it feels like people are learning how to refer to and deal with this issue. But when people have extraordinary power, do they listen? This is the thing. My actions are constantly in conflict with power — how I measure my power in a space; how my body is subject to power; how the materials I use can bend or be utilised...

Part of the making is to understand that I can’t push a material beyond a certain limit. I don’t want to kill what I’m working with. I want my work to acknowledge that all of these things, like time and material, are precious. As is the attention of the audience. To get people to come look, engage, and ask questions is to ask something of them, too. When people see this kind of work in progress, they understand how rare it is in art; this considered relationship with living creatures, and myself as a living creature.

SC: When you were in residence, testing different models and maquettes, things did feel very alive. Now, one maquette is in the water, doing its thing, but even though it’s active — literally alive — that sense of things happening is not as tangible. It’s a much more gradual process, and a lot of it is taking place below the surface. It relates, in some way, to what Arendt writes about the durability of the fabricated world, and our attempts to create some semblance of stability through their supposed “objectivity.” This, in contrast to the messiness of labour and the actual metabolism of your living, breathing work. So there’s the world of enduring objects (work), which is thought to bring stability, versus that of the cycles and seasons (labour), which bring change and growth.

DH: Everything that we touch, that we work with, comes from nature. We are always in conversation with it, because we’re part of it. Often, as artists, we try to make the materials that we use last forever, because that’s what we owe the collector, you know? We work with materials that contain forever chemicals, which is dangerous, because when you get very involved those materials go into you. There’s an energy transfer. You become part of a material network. But when you collaborate with nature, you have to allow your work to be subjected to entropy. When you work with living things, you support each other in the way that you work.

I don’t want to create a massive amount of waste. That includes the waste of my own physical labour. That’s why I really like strategies — working in conversation with others who have built their own skill sets. Anything that takes skill to build is part of a practice. You don’t just know how to do shit. You have to work with it; to figure out, for yourself, how your body responds. I might watch something to learn how to weave, but I also like figuring
out my own way of getting there. If I just follow the recipe I don’t feel like I can do it yet, you know? There’s this idea of the artist as genius, this centralising view, which has very little to do with skill. It’s about power and privilege.Nowadays people share their process on social media, which is very generous. You can pick up quite a lot, and get inspired. I originally saw a floating island on Instagram. It captured my imagination and I kept reading about it, you know? Ultimately, all I’m doing is making a floating island, but to be able to do it I have to do it, you know? Of course, there’s a lot more to it than that.

SC: When you were here you were cutting down bamboo, getting plants from all over and trying them out; seeing what works... It’s very different to how I imagine the making of the inflatable?

DH: Completely. I started creating the inflatables as an extension of the performance work I’ve been doing — documenting myself, how my body occupies space... Also because of lockdown. I built a model, making it simpler and simpler and simpler, until it was just a bunch of intersecting ovoids. I then sent that model to a company that produces inflatables.

SC: I guess that’s the other side of the spectrum, right? There’s this industrial, manufactured approach versus this time-consuming, laborious one.

DH: Yeah. There’s a lot of human error, too. You really have to figure it out. I’ve bled so much in the last two months, making work with my hands. There’s been a shift in my relationship to the work.

SC: How much of working with your hands, now, is about not wanting to feel that detachment from the world?

DH: It’s connected to the way that art objects are manufactured — the record, the archive, all of that. It’s about human embodiment. Also, just because something is digital doesn’t mean it’s not embodied. So much of the trauma that I’ve experienced has come from the fucking internet, never mind all that epigenetic trauma. It’s all recorded, like the rings on a tree. You can trace things about who you are right now to your trauma. It’s like the intensity of the material that is our bodies; this fleshy, baggy fucking stuff that is so coded with the chemicals of the emotions that we’ve had, and other people’s emotions, and the way our bodies are regulated.

SC: I’m thinking about your clay work now — how it holds the memory of your contact with it.

DH: Exactly. There’s a real magic that happens when you work intensely with things that are also vibrating — when you have this one-on-one relationship.

SC: But it makes sense to hear you talk about the give back; what that thing also contributes to your body, positive or negative.

DH: Absolutely. A living sculpture will have its own relationship to the space, too. It’s out of your control. It’s a bit cheeky. Like, how dare I even make this work? Because I can’t do it as well as nature would. There’s this interference of my messy human self.

SC: But the intervention is as much about how people perceive themselves and their relationship to things, as it is an intervention in nature, right? The artwork is really for people...

DH: Yeah, you also need to let work go if you’re going to keep making things, otherwise you end up having to carry shit from place to place. The biggest thing about making work is having to then look after it if it doesn’t sell. Because often they’re made with such permanent materials that it’s kind of your responsibility. All these polishes and pigments become the weight of the work. Working with materials that didn’t exist before — materials that are made of other materials, like turps — not only changes how we think about them but can also have unintended effects; things that are manipulated or shaped to look and feel a particular way.

SC: You also experimented with using found steel, which John [Nkhoma] helped to weld into skeleton structures for the maquettes.

DH: I think I read somewhere that ninety-percent of the steel produced is recycled, so as far as industrial processes go, it’s one of the more sustainable materials, which is pretty remarkable given its value, right? These exchanges are part of the responsibility of the artist as producer, and that fact that it’s found steel is a plus.
I don’t feel like I’m much of a collector, but I do collect things that I can use to make things. I love buying tools because they’re all potential. I have so much respect for people who make things because of making things myself. Industrialisation really takes away what people do with huge amounts of their time. It doesn’t make sense to me that we live like this, because we’re not happy, and it manifests in everything that we do.

One thing that consistently makes humans happy is making things with their bodies — using your body. Recreation. Going for a hike... The way that we live is very isolating. One thing I’ve come to love is making things with others around. It’s not always great, but it can be really productive. I love it, as much as I also really don’t like people, but I’m looking for connection. That’s also the thing about material, right? It’s also connection. There are all these things that get under your skin, you know?

At the moment I’m really struggling to painting — to leave things two-dimensional or make works that have that graphic quality. Maybe it’s because I’ve relied on it for so long. I think I’ve made a reputation with this very minimalist, clean typographic work, but it also frustrates me that it’s so clean, you know? Like, where can you be messy, as an artist? And not fully succeed? Good work is what people intend to make.

On Saturday there was a workshop with Kanaladorp Press, with Soft Intifada. The funny thing, that never really gets documented in those spaces, is that often it’s just creating an opportunity where people can make things with their hands and be quite vulnerable and present with each other. People connect in those spaces. Often, as artists, there is an ecosystem of scarcity. There’s not enough to go around, and we’re often in competition with each other, but not in those spaces. Sure, some people are competitive, but there are lots of people who aren’t. In order to keep the space pleasant for everyone, you have to lose a little control of how you make. If you try keep control it’s going to be very uncomfortable for everyone, so when we make together we’re a little bit more generous with other people. It’s just about understanding what you’re doing and what your impact is. I do think that making work in this way makes me a better person, to live with my own self, and to make me more livable with others. It’s an act of privilege, to be able to do this work, and if you don’t have access to wealth it’s very hard. You have to make a lot of sacrifices to work in this ecosystem. Every artist makes that leap of faith, and it feels important to keep one foot in the world. It can’t just be this lonely affair, creating in a vacuum. Like, if an artist makes work and nobody sees it...