Madness and making mum proud: meeting Ryan Gander

“Before I sold an artwork making art made me feel a bit mad. I was doing things that were fundamentally unusual, filling my life with really weird stuff, like embroidering stars on the bus on the way to Manchester,” says Ryan Gander. “That’s what mad people do. It’s not what normal people do.” Selling art and being seen as “a bit mad” aren’t really things Ryan has to worry about any more. The conceptual artist’s work is a slippery thing to sum up in easy, pithy statements. It ranges from recreations of a chess set based on his father’s recollections of making car parts in a factory to immortalising the dens his young daughter made in a gallery setting to his Loose Associations lectures, where he shows a series of seemingly interconnected images and describes how each relates to the next (“you see a tramp eating rice pudding and you link it to a rainbow coloured vajazzle”). While formally multifarious, the thread connecting each of these projects is his passion for collaboration and for telling stories, something we find him to be exceptionally good at when we visit his London studio. “Before I sold an artwork making art made me feel a bit mad. I was doing things that were fundamentally unusual, filling my life with really weird stuff, like embroidering stars on the bus on the way to Manchester.” Ryan Gander “Nothing exists in isolation, and things that do exist in isolation aren’t interesting for the world,” he says. “Being a painter and sitting in your studio and painting things on your own is not participation, that’s not an interesting practice. I wouldn’t enjoy that.” Ryan’s current collaborator is his six-year-old daughter Olive, with whom he’s curating a show at the Quartz Gallery in Berlin. It’s a perfect example of Ryan’s approach to art: taking an idea and putting it in the hands of someone else, and seeing what’s going to happen. It’s playful, communicative and far more complex than the objects or works in isolation would appear to be. “[The project] has involved me telling Olive what to make, her disagreeing and my wife telling me I’m stopping her being creative and to let her get on with it,” Ryan explains. “We’ve made two or three works together and we’ve made some separately that have a dialogue with each other. I’m not trying to tell her what to do. It’s funny because it’s going to be a better show because she’s doing it.” Seemingly from nowhere, one of Ryan’s assistants pulls out a huge pile of printed shoeboxes, emblazoned with a design created by Olive when Ryan gave her a white box to do whatever she fancied with. Eventually, 1000 of these will be created and placed in the gallery. Ryan explains: “I guess we’ll just make them, put them there and let her play. She’ll do something that’s either totally unexpected or totally expected. When she started painting the outside of the shoeboxes, that’s something I would never had thought of doing – using a 3D object as a flat surface. It’s counter-logical: it’s something an adult would never think of doing.” This drive to align with impulses that get shrouded in jobs, stresses and suits and ties in adulthood is something Ryan has long explored. “Kids don’t have the cultural baggage we have, and they don’t have all the association of art as elitism as a sort of shadow in their mind,” he says. “[Adults] are scared of reading art wrong and they’re scared of humiliation. That’s why I’m fascinated with working with my kids: they won’t be kids for long and they don’t have that cultural baggage. They’re not scared of accidentally being creative.” So can adults ever return to that innocent, liberated mode of creativity? “ We don’t pretend any more,” says Ryan. “Pretence is an amazing human quality but adults never pretend. They can imagine, but pretending is different. Imagination is just in your head – it’s musing or daydreaming. Pretending is physically role playing and acting out that imagination.” “Kids don’t have the cultural baggage we have, and they don’t have all the association of art as elitism as a sort of shadow in their mind” Ryan Gander Taking this statement into account when reading Ryan’s work gives a few more clues into his process. Many works are direct physical manifestations of imagined events, such as his “parapossible situations” works, which explore other realities in which the artist could have existed. These involve a role play of sorts, with an entire cast of odd characters including Ernest Hawker. “He is a 65-year-old version of me, a failed parallel version of me who lives in New York and wears white jeans,” Ryan tells us. “He’s pissed all the time and smells of BO and he’s got a little yellow spot of piss on his trousers. He goes around all the gallery openings and VIP things annoying people and trying to get them to buy keyrings he’s made of his work from his good old days of success.” But it’s far too simplistic to reduce Ryan’s work to just reenacting his imaginary personae or making thoughts into something tangible. If at