White collar crime.

Office chairs, door wedges, strip lights: Manchester-based artist Ian Rawlinson has spent the past twenty years creating artworks that emerge out of his concerns with the urban environment. From building sculptures out of functional materials to devising public installations with sometime collaborator Nick Crowe, Rawlinson’s practice scrutinises our post-industrial legacy. With work in a new exhibition opening at Castlefield Gallery today, Rawlinson talks to Jessica Lack about office furniture and his ongoing obsession with door wedges.

Jessica: Tell us about some of the sculptures in your new exhibition, Unresolved.

Ian: I am interested in the way that manufactured objects are subject to a system of standardisation in order to fit in with other things. For instance, strip lights. They come in standard sizes, they assemble together in a neat way, so I have this range of objects in my studio that I fit together, and sometimes disparate objects will come together and their dimensions are just ‘so’. Like bricks, I lay them on their side and they’re exactly the same width as a set of shelves I have knocking around. There’s something about the perfectness of the fit between two disparate objects that excites me. Much of my work in this show will be a result of me playing about in my studio with such objects.

J: The results are quite work-a-day, aren’t they?

I: Yeah, it’s an office chair, a set of office shelves, a little heater which would probably have been used in an office… they’re not decorative objects. I’ve often heard the artist Pavel Büchler quote somebody and I can’t think who it was. The line goes something like this: that objects and things in the world should not be confined to their identities. You have to go beyond the given identity of a thing in the world and breathe new life in to it – and perhaps what artists are doing is taking things that are on their very last legs and giving them new life.

J: That makes me think about the sculpture with the chair and the heater you made.

I: That one’s going in the show. It started as a warm, safe chair because the studio is so cold. I didn’t think ‘I know what would be a good idea, I’ll put a bunch of radiators around this chair’. At one point I did have an idea to bring all the heaters of the building together and re-route all the plumbing but then I discovered other artists had done a similar thing, so I dismissed it. But then having put the heater right next to my legs so I could keep warm, I stood back from it and recognised it had some kind of quality.

J: I like the idea that you are using it as a functional object as well as a sculpture at the same time.

I: I suppose visitors to the gallery could be invited to sit on it, but I’m not sure they would even allow me to turn it on. Perhaps we could turn the heating down so that it doesn’t actually cause a fire.

J: This is a classic problem isn’t it? The history of a work of art made in a studio is completely up-ended when transferred into a gallery context?

I: I suppose it is in that instance but over a period of time these things settle into something. And certainly when you combine it with the other pieces it should be able to stand up in the gallery, in a conversation with the other works.

J: Tell me about your collection of door wedges?

I: Yes, I’ve been collecting wedges for years now. They are institutional wedges. I’ve been round to people’s houses and seen rather fetching wedges in their living rooms but I’ve never taken them, but in institutional contexts, if I see a door wedge I tend to just steal it. I think it might have been the cause of much irritation – I got one from the Faculty office, I’ve got one from a Spanish airport, a town hall, one from the BBC when I was there once, but however notable or exotic, they are all kind of equal. So the one that I found in the student toilets, let’s say at the art college, which was very easy to acquire because there was nobody around – that is absolutely as important a wedge as the one that Nick Crowe nicked from the Berlin Reichstag and brought back for me as a contribution to the collection. I don’t make any attempt to catalogue them or reveal the origin of each of these wedges for the viewer, so in that sense they are all absolutely equal, and are just this interesting group. There’s a relationship to bureaucracy because they are institutional things.

J: They have a universal conformity too.

I: Yeah, wedges are wonderful things, they hold things apart, they hold things open, they stop things and they open things, it’s a strange paradox, which is interesting. Materially, sculpturally, they’re just beautiful things.

Unresolved runs at Castlefield Gallery until 31 January 2010. Jessica Lack is an arts writer for The Guardian, she also writes for various magazines including Dazed and Confused and ID Magazine. Her book Tate Guide to Modern Art Terms, written in collaboration with Simon Wilson, was recently published by Tate Publishing and she is currently working on a book about a composer for Fourth Estate.

Images (top to bottom): Wedges (2009); Do Not Cover (2009), both Ian Rawlinson.

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