Stephen Willats

Tower Mosaic was an interactive art project that used two site specific buildings, the Brinklow-Pricethrope House, Warwick and the Brindley Estate, West London along with its residents as participants to create a mosaic in response to directions posed by the artist.

The artist Stephen Willats worked with six residents from each building to begin the project. He interviewed them about various domestic objects in their homes, how they felt about them, recorded their responses and created directions for the mosaic project for the tenants based off of these conversations.

A desk was set up in the lobby of each building to assist the tenants with participation in the project. Residents were invited to respond to visually to the artist?s directions by creating a drawing for the mosaic inside a tower book square. Ultimately, each drawing would became a part of one of the temporary mosaics that was put up in each respective building.

This book is a documentary of the the process of the Tower Mosaic project, but also reveals an interesting sociological aspect of the project as well.

Artist’s book, made from a walk at night down the stairwell of the building ‘Homecourt’ in the Highfields Estate, Feltham, West London. The black-&-white photographs are grouped in pairs (i.e. recording the view up and down the stairs at any one point); the brief text is a transcription of whatever came on tape during the course of the walk. The pages are numbered in reverse order, to correspond with the floors, (walking downwards).

A description of this work made in a tower block at Highfields Estate, Feltham, West London in 1990 along with illustrations of the work in situ.

The book features three people, a civil servant, a stockbroker and a woman manager. The daytime appearance and personality of each is juxtaposed against their night-time roles in which each dresses for and identifies with a particular sub-culture. The brief text consists of a commentary, in their own words, on the marked contrast between the two personae. The book’s intention is to show how each of them are, in effect, two different people at the same time.

Artist’s book, made in conjunction with an exhibition at the Lisson Gallery, featuring three works made with the individuals appearing in the book.

This publication accompanies the Stephen Willats exhibition at Whitechapel Gallery. It features an interview with the artist by the Archive Curator, Nayia Yiakoumaki.

The publication has been made possible with the support of Anne Mosseri-Marlio Galerie, Basel, Switzerland.

The Lurky Place existed as an area of wasteland close to Hayes, on the outer fringes of West London. The area is in the middle of a busy industrial suburb and is only about half a mile from the main shopping centre of Hayes. Although it is enclosed within an industrial urban environment, it remains physically cut off, there being few points of entry.

The landscape of The Lurky Place contains many images which are distanced from the institutions, norms and conventions which hold the fabric of society together. The nature of this place is, of course, a product of the surrounding society ? it forms a fulfilling context for behaviour and activities outside normal, daily life. The value it has for residents of surrounding housing estates is as a symbol of a consciousness which is counter to that of the predominant social stereotypes. The way peoples? destinies are largely determined by the dulling routines of their daily lives is contrasted with the freedom of pursuits and interests carried out within The Lurky Place. Elements of this freedom are transported from the constraints of our dominant culture and discarded in The Lurky Place, in the course of engaging in these various pursuits. Through these residual items, it is possible to structure connections between the consciousness vested in The Lurky Place and the restrictive society in which they originated.

The movement of an item from the urban environment surrounding this place to its interior represents a fundamental point of perceptual transformation of the object. Two types of transformation occur: – 1) an item is given a different use 2) the intended use of certain items is more fully realised by their being freed from inhibitory conventions. In both transformations, the implicit escape of an item from the restraining conventions of society also frees the person involved. For such a person, the item becomes a manifestation of another consciousness which is outside the social norm. the boring routines of work and home are relieved by the freedom to engage in uninhibited pursuits. It is the release of a culturally suppressed consciousness into a discarded area of land which gives the location its analogous power. It is within such a place that a consciousness, counter to that of institutional society, is kept alive. In this sense, The Lurky Place is a symbol of all such environments in urban society.

Willats uses books in two ways: in the first books can be as artworks in their own right. The other, as the example above, is when a book acts as a tool within the artwork.

Meta Filter was a computer based work that functioned between two people, it operated in a way that provided a formal environment and structure for them to externalise their perceptions of inter-personal behaviour.

The two operators looked at a series of images of people which were concerned with interpersonal relationships, perhaps on their own or with others and were asked to describe a series of social behaviours and questions of identity using a set thesaurus of words. The participants worked towards agreement, and in the process, became involved in discussions of how they individually perceived the problems presented to them and how they could reach consensus. The overall structure of the problems was to move from the individual?s relationship to themselves, then their relationships within a group, a community and other societies.

Each participant used a Problem Book to record their responses. The Book presented the problems on the left hand side and responses were recorded on the right hand side, this side was duplicated to record a copy. These copied responses were pinned up on a display so participants could also review the responses of other participants to the work.