 So first of all, just thank you for coming out and spending your Saturday evening with us. We are absolutely thrilled to be on the opening, the public opening evening of an Alice of as Dublin, which is the first monographic show of British artists and designer as Dublin. And we really are in for an incredible treat tonight. I mean, as Maria had mentioned, as and I have been in conversation for over five years at this point, this is our first public conversation. And everything has been made manifest in the book, which we are thrilled, as is here to sign for all of you. Oh, did I just look at it out? But really, one of the things that I wanted to do with the show upstairs is to bring to general audiences, as is work to make people aware of everything that she does. Because I think so many of us are, let's try this, I think so many of us are aware of as is work without even realizing who it was, it creates this, we've probably all seen so many of the pop concert, the stadium tours, the Olympic ceremonies that she has designed for the theater shows, the opera shows, the NFL Super Bowl halftime show. You know, but really what she's doing is applying her art to bring people together, whether that's in an intimate theatrical setting or in a vast stadium venue. And she's doing that to form what she calls temporary societies, united through the experiences that she creates. And she really is one of the most influential designers of our time and Donna Tien Grau, who's the head of programs at the Louvre, called as a Renaissance woman in his opening essay in the book. And I could not agree more. So the show upstairs, of course, is a survey of her work over the past 30 years. We have hundreds upon hundreds of the sketches and drawings and paintings and models, all that form the seeds of some of the most memorable cultural congregations of music and art and activism from our recent times. And of course, all of this coincides with the publication of the book. So tonight we're going to touch on, as is extraordinary creative work, her process and her practice, and of course, on our making of the book and the exhibition. And we'll have time for a Q&A at the end, so be thinking of some questions then that you can ask as. And I think we will all surely come away with a bit of a shift in perspective. Farrell Williams in the book said about as that when you meet with her, with her perspective, she literally turns things around as is a walking turning point for anyone she interacts with. And so it's an incredibly special evening that we are able to have that time here with you tonight. So as I want to first start out, ask you a question I know you're always asked, but everyone is always curious to know how did you get started? How did all of this start? Well, before I answer the question, which you know I will, firstly, I just want to welcome everyone and thank you because we have talked before, but we've not done a talk in front of an audience who are the public. We didn't talk a moment, but it was invited audience. So thank you so much for buying a ticket. Thank you for being interested enough to turn up. It's really, really lovely and you are a really special audience to me because it's one thing to invite people, but to have people who bought tickets come is really special. So thank you for coming on the first day of the show. Thank you for buying tickets for this event a while ago. It means a lot. In answer to your question, how did it start? So I guess I was one of those children at school who, from the age of around six, I guess, I think from what my understanding of neuroscience is, which is very popular science and not profound, but I understand that around six years old is when a child's mind starts to coalesce, the wiring in it starts to converge, I think, from what I've read. And what I was doing when I was six was a number of things. I was, I just moved from the suburbs of London where I grew up with one of four children and I had just moved to the seaside to a small town. And I guess it was a very particular time, the end of the 1970s. It was a time in Britain where there was a kind of socialist hope, I guess, of the good life of moving out of the city to the countryside. My parents applied to God and hoped we would be self-sufficient. I think it all, anyway, we weren't talking further about that. But so it was a hopeful time when I was six, I guess. And we moved to a house that was much bigger than we would have had in London, known as the suburbs. And there was room for us to have a little sort of theatrical space. It was tiny. It was literally like the Harry Potter space where he lived underneath the stairs. It was that cupboard. But to us it was huge because it was ours and we could shut a little curtain. And we had one of those things like you, there's actually a post of it in the corridor up there, a little viewfinder thing that you could click with little circular slides. And we would click through that and sort of enter different worlds. We would set up a little light bulb, do little shadow plays, we had toy theaters and we would just make our own world. There wasn't much to do at the end of the 70s. There was not much telly. The TV didn't start. There was only three channels and it didn't start till 4pm. And there wasn't much money for us. So it was make things out of cardboard boxes under the stairs. Another strange thing happened in that next to my house was a model of our town, a little scale model. And I think in my brain, when I looked, what happened with this scale model is they did a little Sony Lumiere. So every house in the model told a story. There was a little voice coming out of the model of houses. And because I was young and this is all I knew, I thought that houses spoke. I genuinely thought it. And I think also something happens when you look at a scale model and there's a reason why we all like them is because we are able to consider ourselves at two perspectives at once. We consider ourselves tiny and this thing is giant and we consider ourselves big and this thing is small and somehow understandable and there's a calming sort of aspect in that comfort, I think, in thinking you can see a system while also seeing your own part in the system. And I think at some level I was getting that and I thought I was at once in my house and that my house could talk. And then there was another thing in that the person who had lived in my house before had written a book about ghosts in the house that told stories. So there were all sorts of things converging and then what was the question again? Oh yeah, how did I start? So yeah, that happened. And then when I was at school I liked doing lots of different things. I liked to play musical instruments. I was super hard working on my music. It wasn't particularly good but I worked hard and I liked drawing and I liked reading and in the end by the time we're doing this could take a while. So by the time I got to the end of my studies really what the teacher said to me is, you must work in the theatre. There is nowhere else where you will find this convergence. I didn't think the theatre was very interesting. I had seen pantomimes and androidote were the musicals but that was it. So I wasn't a big lover and I didn't really get it. But when I went and met the people on the theatre design course I liked the room. I liked the smell of the room. I liked the people. I liked what they were doing. I liked their little cardboard models. I liked the conviviality, the communality of it and then they started taking me to good theatre, really good theatre and by now we're in the 80s and the British arts scene has taken off. It's all about how much money the art is worth. The 80s are happening. Margaret Thatcher is saying there's no such thing as society, only the individual and I'm not thinking consciously about this but something in me is saying making communal work for a collective audience feels right to me. So that's the story. Up to a point. Yeah. Well and this is a thing. They're really, very clearly is this urge and this impulse in your work to connect and to communicate and to share. I mean you are an artist but you apply your art in the collective and that's what's so fascinating. I mean tell us a bit more than about your early transitions then into some of those early theatres, El Mida theatre, the Bush theatre and then how you began to transition into larger theatres, European opera. So something was happening in the mid 90s when I started, I just finished my course and I started in little theatres, tiny theatres, 75 audience, little rooms, no bigger than this room probably. The stage, not much bigger than this stage, we're standing on actually at the Bush theatre and yet the plays were big and the reason the plays were big was because again as a result of 20 years of Thatcher's lack of investment in the arts in Britain there was no investment in the British film industry. We used to see French films, there was a lot of new French films but not British, not you know unless they were not a young independent scene there just wasn't. So a lot of young writers who wanted to write a film would instead write a play because they knew they could get it put on cheaply but they would write it like a film so it had like 64 scenes and we're on a stage this big. So the really good thing about that was there wasn't an option to slide bedrooms on and off that wasn't going to happen. So the craft of finding the essence of a text and expressing the essence of what's important and what you need to communicate to a gathering of 75 people that wasn't the choice so much as a necessity and that's really where I guess I honed my craft of trying to find the essence of a text in those small theatres and then that led to bigger theatres and then to opera and from there to pop music. You know and give us a glimpse into that transition into pop music how did that happen and is that approach any different than what you were doing already for theatre in opera? So how it happened was from an opera project I was invited to do a very you know a one night only pop project it's upstairs it's called wire it's a band called wire and I had been going out with a record producer sound engineer so I'd been to a lot of gigs and I'd always seen this go he liked guitar bands so I'd always seen these kind of four men one man singing on a little podium the rest sort of were there gear lots of cables and I just thought it was a bit messy and I went to tidy it up because I'll tidy this up I don't know anything about me rock and roll but I'll tidy it up so I drew a little square around each one put them each in a box and I also because I had been so used to from three years studying English literature I forgot to mention that but I had been so used to having to be rigorous and I couldn't get away with just saying it will be so there had to be you know a justification for it so I needed a hook I couldn't just do a design I'm really crap at decorating if you asked me to do your wedding I don't know where to start I'd have to like go into what's the story what's the narrative you know when you're getting divorced I don't know but so so I I needed a hook so I thought well what if I treat this as a portrait of the band so I filmed one band members ear for the whole show one band members nose one mouth and one eye then I also read them all up to ECG heart-reading machines so we had their heartbeat going all the way through and I slightly faked the MRI scan because I was too expensive but it looked like it was an MRI scan at the back so it was a sort of composite portrait of this band and that for me then I understood what I was doing and I could see a meaning and a worth in doing it so that's how it began and then Kanye saw that show in a picture because my friend happened to be in a room near him when he heard him firing somebody so that's how I ended up doing touch the touch touch the sky tour which was his college tour in 2004 so that was beginning of a decade of collaboration and I do just have to ask circling back to your wire performance at the end of the show when the band so I haven't seen Spinal Tap apparently it's a film about pop gone wrong and all that I'm I refuse to see it but apparently it is a film about sort of comedy you know failures so do set design for pop shows so I'm not gonna see it but what I did do which people have told me is similar is this was a very very low budget this first pop concert it was probably I think I had three thousand pounds to make these four big boxes even though it's a while ago that still wasn't enough money and I had I went mirror on the inside I think I just put tin foil in the end I couldn't get mirror and I put these BP screens on the back I needed to get four projectors it was quite ambitious and when it came to getting Velcro so that I could you know take these scrims off the front that was beyond the budget but I think the Velcro is going to be 150 pounds I didn't have so I just never mind we'll staple them in so once the band rain I just went around staple them in and I didn't really consider how they were going to get out and I hadn't realized it was their farewell performance and these were all their fans at the Barbican Hall all coming out to see their last glimpse of their great heroes so at the end of course they were but yeah there wasn't really a front curtain either so they just had to stay there till the audience left I also found out later that the band absolutely hated each other so they were quite happy to be in separate boxes but it was impossible for them to play I did find that out later so they just completely played it off track so anyway apart from them not being able to play and hate each other not be able to get out it was a really excellent design but it looks good you know that's what's so interesting though is is you know you stay so true to the narrative or you really dig in to find a story even in a pop concert you know so how did you then continue to do that for on these bigger stages and with bigger artists what do you look to to find the narrative yeah I think I'm just really intolerant of things that don't mean something I just think like I've always thought that life's big too short you know there's this book actually that um Ross Silkass recommended to me called four thousand weeks why do you think does anyone know in the audience why a book would be called four thousand weeks has anyone read it someone just said it yes how long we live sorry down on the evening cheerful question let's talk about pop stars anyway um yeah I just I have always felt that I guess I've always felt the urgency of anything I'm I'm quite a diligent person I'm quite a I'm quite a sort of a subperson in the school and was like that the front of the class and no one liked me because I was just like the little swap but I just I'm an enthusiast and I'm curious and I'm quite I'm quite determined to make every single beat of my life count even if it's just me humbly drawing a bird I will give my whole self to it and I just can't live in any other way because I do the older I get also I I do feel that we are incredibly lucky to be born I think you could be born in all sorts of places and ways and or not not being born and I just think on this planet I see as an immense privilege and I think not consciously but I've always had a sense of that so the idea for me of messing around with you know just some decoration or should we just put some lights up I can't do it it's not that it's not that I don't I actually can't I don't know where to start I just I make really crap work when I can't find a meaning so that's what I've done throughout and actually with any lyric you can find something my my my studio used to laugh at me because with take that they had a song called I want you back I want you back I want you back for good and I'd be sitting there like undermining it you know they're like how can you find how can you annotate that I was like I can find you don't find in anything um yeah there's a mantra in everything there's always a reason why somebody bothered to write that down there's always a context so I've just carried on the same as I used to do when I was studying English literature I've just carried on the same every time um well you know and that's what I love even and we see this upstairs is the annotated set list I mean you are treating these pop lyrics as primary texts because they are they are but the I have to say to you those set lists as you know are there's a quite funny story as to why they're annotated that the lyric sheets are annotated because I'm trying to find a way through make a map find really an overlap between my lines of inquiry and the artist's lines of inquiry um and there always is one somewhere you know we're all humans there's always an overlap if you look hard enough for it um the set lists often we're doing little drawings on set lists simply because I had been used to a rehearsal process a technical rehearsal process in a theater how many people in here work in theaters anyone a theater designer okay so you know what it how it is in the tech you know it's quite orderly most of the time you know we start the tech in a call rehearsal we you know program our lights the actors say their piece we put the light on them we put the video on them if there is some we bring a prop on and you stitch it together slowly and that's how you build it up um in rock and roll it's not like that it's just plain and it's really loud so you can't quietly say oh you cannot hear each other you're mainly wearing well I wish I'd been wearing earplugs and I wouldn't be so deaf now people kept saying to me do you want earplugs I was like no and now I'm really quite deaf but anyway I'm blind I should have worn glasses and earplugs the whole time but um so so a lot of those annotations on the set list that you see upstairs is literally me talking to the video designer or the light designer going like that and showing it or writing notes as we go through the show so that's really what they are me watching the rehearsal and making little notes because you cannot talk and it all happens it's not stops stops art um they just go and you have to quickly catch up it's very very different vibe well and then all of a sudden in 2012 you're doing the London Olympic ceremonies the closing ceremonies and um and you're doing again continuing to do larger scale works and it just seems like there begins to be this velocity to your practice itself and so you know what what kind of began give us a glimpse into that period what the London 2012 was interesting um I see that's quite turning point in in well it was for us in London actually because you know we had a big turning point in 1997 when 20 years of the conservative government ended and it was a period of great hope for us um when the new Labour Government came in we really thought there was a big shift and in many ways there was um a load more investment in the arts I was able to open the new in 1998 we opened the new um South Wales building I mean sure enough it had obviously been planned before that but it felt like the Tate modern then opened it felt like there was a real movement towards investment in arts a new cultural spirit in London it felt really hopeful actually um then of course Princess Diana died same year um which was extraordinary because Britain London well the whole country behaved almost like a Catholic country when you walked through Kensington Gardens there were candles all over the the grass there were little you know bunches of flowers and that's not the way English people historically had behaved in my experience it was very unusual it was a big outpouring so it was quite a specific time and then you know the 90s went on um and then you know we get into the 2000s here we are then in 2010 with the Conservative Government and 2012 was a bit of a people all thought it was going to be a disaster you know all the cab drivers said oh there'll be traffic jams it's going to be rubbish it's going to rain oh it'll be over budget we tell it was a bit of a British you know no one built together it's all going to be terrible and actually my first design for the closing ceremony was I thought I would kind of second guess it being bad weather so I made this whole cloth to cover the entire stadium in big grey clouds in fact in the event we had so little time to set that show but we didn't get it on so we just put down this big well really I'd have to tell you what I was asked to do for that one because it was quite unusual having sort of worked with character a lot this was an invitation to express the character of a country and of a city and I was given a very express direction by the British government that it had to be or by the you know by the director really in fairness but it had been proved by the government and they wanted it to be a big Union Jack flag and I thought it was a really terrible idea because it's meant to be Olympic in spirit it's not meant to be you know about the country all of the athletes from 200 countries going to be on it so I said no let's not do that but I you know people often ask me what happens when you know you have to design something you don't want to do and this is a really interesting example of it I think because I the choice was either don't do the project or make a go of this flag so I did what I historically do when I'm quite stuck and I was quite impressed about it and I thought okay well let me research this flag see if I can I have I've always had a bad feeling about this flag but I'm going to research it see if I can find anything redeeming in its history so I went back um this was quite early days of the internet you know in 2011 if you googled Union Jack art you found cushions you found Jerry Hallingwell's dress from the from the Spice Girls and you did find the sex pistols torn up God save the Queen cover I thought well that's got some energy but I can't really put that on the Olympics that might not go down so well it was water it's water um I think I need some more glasses up here it's got time um so I researched and then I found um an article about the origins of the flag so James the first back in the 1600s had some graphic designers design the UK flag when he was busy poaching Scotland and combining the George Cross the red cruciform structure and the St Andrews Chris Cross in blue so you can see in the history of the flag the history of colonization was just like a it was a stamp on top and then you know when the British government in 1800s then nipped Northern Ireland it was just that you know the Patrick's was shoved in there as well so I then realized why I never really liked it but when I was growing up the only time you saw the Union Jack flag was either on a skinheads fascist forehead tattooed for national front you know anti-immigration racist skinhead people or it was um older people who were waving flags at tea parties had an old sense of empire but no one my age would have ever gone near that flag we felt weird about it and then I understood why and I looked at this history I thought that that's why I don't like it so I thought how can I get the energy of that sex pistols exploit you know torn up safety pin flag and still be celebratory and celebrate the fact that we're doing the Olympics so I saw I had worked with Damien Hurst years ago as an intern and his spin paintings were just out then so I went to his studio and said to his team I actually didn't get an audience with him at the time and I said to his team would would we be able to take this spin painting color it red white and blue and turn it into a flag so it has that centrifugal champagne cork popping but also anarchic you know expansion celebration bursting apart at the seams then I felt comfortable with the flag and then all the cruciform bits that were meant to be white I printed new sprint with uh text from 3000 words of British poetry which no one actually saw but it took a long time to clear anyway um and then on the day of setting it up we were running around uni of 16 hours and I was setting all these pieces out and the the eighth one was missing so at literally the cameras are rolling I'm looking in the top shot there's these beautiful shots again amazing but it's like a pizza with one bit green with the grass and this and and all everyone's mobile phones have run out we're running around this stadium trying to find the last bit of this bloody black and some and some health and safety checkers had put it in the bin because they were worried that an athlete might trip on it anyway so were you that in in time that was that was the olympics yeah yeah actually what happened there just another just to finish the story I know we've gone on a bit about this but for anyone who works in anything about how to how to use what you have in that moment I had health and safety people saying we're going to take all of it away so I went to the mass movement guy and I said I haven't got staples to staple this whole thing down or have I got time I said can you turn your mass cast into human staples can they stand like this because he had them all it was like the Truman show when you do a mass casting they all have their little in ears and I thought that was the only thing I can mobilize is people and I just begged him I think I was weeping and believe my hands were bleeding I was just weep I was like please and they could see it look great it wasn't just me begging the thing itself was begging to be completed you could see it on the screen you could see it was going to be good so he ran around and planted his people anyway each shows like that I wonder I'm exhausted well actually and I have to ask you I mean for all of this work you do how do you maintain the stamina it's absolutely incredible you're just prolific how do you do it I think it's there's a few things um I think people I think I'm I draw the energy from people around me I really am buoyed up by my studio team the teams are even making this the show upstairs or you could see me just kind of going but you know I I I don't I just learned you don't have to do anything on your own and actually people love it when you come to them and say I'm completely stuck please help it's a really generous thing to do to to go and say please help me um so I've learned that and I do very little on my own that's why because when you say stamina I actually it's all everything is done with friends even that day at the Olympics I rang everybody all my friends came we had like five set designers they all because it was only set designers who had the um badge the uh accreditation who were allowed on site at that point but they all the designer of the opening ceremony of the Paralympics Olympic ceremony we were meant to be in competition there was no competition we were all colleagues they all came they all helped me so I don't do anything on my own I'm always helped I'm always part of the team and I think we feel that even as an audience you know you said that audiences are like a temporary society a rehearsal community so can you talk about the role that the audience even plays in your work yeah I think I think something really happened interesting happens when human beings gather together and I think you know there's been much written about it that's of the optimum gatherings 150 people which is what we have about here I think um and I think different sizes of groups of people have different characteristics and I've learned about them because I've spent time with groups of 75 people in small theaters I've spent time with groups of you know 1,000 people in larger theaters and time with groups of 100,000 people in stadia and each has a different quality each I would say is like a different species so I see the audience as a really intelligent beast a combined mind and I felt that as we all have everyone sitting here is felt that you're feeling it now but when something is actually happening interaction between humans conducting energy with other humans in this type of arrangement I mean I've quoted this a few times this week so I at the risk of boring you I'll say it again if you've heard me say this before in the book there's an interview with Lindsay Turner who's a fantastic director a theater director and she said something so beautiful she's she said the thing about theater is the actors agree to pretend that the audience aren't there the audience agree to pretend that they're not there and we all agree to do this at 7 30 and we still the ego for the greater good she said that oh that's what we're doing um but also when you sit in an audience and you can hear everybody getting it at once it's like a continuation of mind um and it's I do believe it's a rehearsal for how we could be you know um in many ways you know and I I I think also collaboration is a rehearsal for how we could be you know I often find I use all my powers of empathy and trying to see through someone else's eyes when I'm working and then I observe that when I walk into a security situation someone's searching my bag I don't even look at the person so I've really taken myself in hand lately over the last five years I guess and you you know I make a real point of trying to try to subtract any situation which has been industrialized any situation in which the terms of engagement between myself and another human being are not operating as two humans or multiple humans but are operating as part of an industrialized hierarchy system and you realize that these systems weren't always there um and I think actually when we're queuing and having searches done or something that's quite an acute version because it's perhaps some of the most mechanized industrialized dehumanized situations we find ourselves in and I used to get frustrated and anxious about it and then I turned it around myself by saying well what if I try to behave you know really consciously in a way that takes away that hierarchical industrialized terms of engagement from any situation ever just shouldn't ever be there and and I think that's a practice that is worth looking at all of us looking at more especially as city dwellers because we spend so much time there's a film upstairs in the penultimate room it's from a piece called Room 2022 and it was me sort of looking at a hotel as a kind of model for a society and looking at the ways we strenuously unimagined things in a hotel I mean I did it I found myself doing it today I've tried to stop doing it but I was in a rush to get out and I left a mess in my room and I really try not to because by leaving a mess in your room you're unimagining the person who's got to clean your shit up so I really try and not do that but um sometimes I you know I do but I think yeah we we are in cities especially in London I'm unimagining the person who's asking for money on the street you know I'm trying to unpick those dehumanized situations I think my life is so much better since I've done it I mean there's such a generosity of spirit in that so this idea around the ritual of gathering how does that play into the exhibition upstairs you did the exhibition design of course so what did you really want audiences to feel after that first studio room and experience well I'll tell you the the sort of etymology of that first room so when I was 1990 through I was studying theatre design I would have been in my early 20s and Felix Barrett many of you might know a company called Punch Drunk a wonderful theatre company he was at school he's a couple years younger than me so he was just finishing school and his teacher took him to an installation called HG about HG Wells by Robert Wilson who's a great theatre maker and by Hans Peter Kuhn who's an amazing German sound designer I went me and Felix didn't know each other but we both went and the way that piece started was everybody walked into a room the room was probably I don't know about half the size of this room and it had a big dining table in it set with steam coming off the piece and the food and you you could only enter alone and you entered alone you looked around this room there was no way out and then quietly this door opened and you could go in but those terms of engagement again the phrase I just used a minute ago but the terms of engagement with which you entered that space then determined how you wanted around you weren't with your mate you weren't judging you were curious you weren't going oh this is good this is bad there's no one I thought it was you weren't doing any of that because you didn't have your mate with you you're on your own and you were just in an environment totally your whole body was an environment so you were reacting with your body and you were kind of too busy to judge too busy to apply your preconceptions um so I learned a lot from that and so did Felix so Felix founded punch drunk based on that room and all of the installation artworks that I've made have started more or less many of them have started with a room just like the one you went into a room where your terms of engagement are established as an audience where you sit you watch and then something happens to the film which splits it apart the first one we had a hole in it it's in the book it's called mirror maze it had a hole in the film literally you walk through it the second one in 2017 had a person just like upstairs putting a little string open the door um and super blue in miami has a little door that opens in it um and I guess yeah I've always felt that about films and people say to me why don't you do films I'm very interested in what a film is projected on I mean to me this surface you know there's a screen I can't quite get beyond that I don't want to pretend it's not there I want to engage with the materiality there's bodies in the room there's a screen surface yes there's a film on it which is magical it's an illusion but can we also engage ourselves in you know the surface cut a hole in it walk through it um so that's what I wanted to do for the beginning of this exhibition also I was really aware that this exhibition is hopefully going to introduce a lot of people to the practice who won't have a clue what I do so it's really important it's quite you know actually sidebar story because people often when I get in a situation I walk into a room and people say so what do you do I'm like oh god well I don't know what to say um this is a real long so now I've got this book in my bag and I just say have a look at that and it's really relaxing so so the reason why I wanted to do the film also is if you just turned up you go yeah but what did this person do you'd be able to just hopefully hopefully get a sense of it um so that's what the film is for well but I also there's something about the experience of being in that room you know and you're with a group of strangers that you don't know and you're all there to encounter this experience and it builds and crescendos and what we were experiencing last night was a range of reactions that audiences would gasp when them when the wall opened there were some that erupted in applause at the end of it so there is I think that you're also just doing something incredibly special by bringing people together in that way I think that's true you know the little group that you go with that's your group and then you go it's which is nice but yeah also to invite people into my studio and something actually we haven't touched on much but it'd be nice to is we've got a plan so if any of you teach or a part of anyone who knows anyone who goes to a school around here or not around here or anywhere we've got a bit of a plan for the program where we want to the wall that gets projected on the studio we want to be able to make that portal to my studio in London so a group come sit around the table and they would look through and I'd be in my studio in London on my studio team whatever meetings we're doing and be able to just do an exchange because we're here till August so we really want to make sure this is reaching out to as many practitioners students kids whatever well and I love that idea of just bringing other people into the practice and giving them access you know just creative collaboration itself is so important to you and even just the way that you designed the opening apertures of the book with again that whole there's like this interrogation of materiality itself and you do the same thing also in the exhibition with the iris you know you're really using these apertures these circles to represent these overlayed perspectives or layers of your collaborators so talk a little bit to us about that act of collaboration whether it's with an audience or with a director or a performer and how you maintain the integrity of an idea well that was really important in the book and in upstairs as well the work that I make is made by so many people I mean a lot of people even the small stuff even our exhibitions made by a lot of people you know and what people give to make this work I cannot tell you whether it's in the artwork that we make the theater work the fashion work the pop music work the lives that are devoted to it I mean I mean Yvonne can we talk about Yvonne? Yvonne is one of our production team upstairs and you know there was something that needed to be restitched and we didn't have a sewing machine she literally sat on the floor the night before the opening go a little sewing kit out you know she had barely slept she just but that's that is really typical of people who work because once you're all collaborating on getting a thing made and I guess the difference between a sort of a practice that you know might be generating things when they're ready with this once you've made a plan to do a show whether it's a gallery show whether it's a theater show the audience are coming that's the one thing you probably won't change they're going to come on that day at that time so that becomes a really key collaborator with everybody else is you know they're coming and you're thrilled they're coming because it means you're going to stop work you know it's fantastic if they didn't come you'd be bloody going forever you know so it really is helpful to know that they're coming and often you know that's the only way we know our work is done it's because the audience have come so it's time and that ritual that sense of ritual that there is an agreement with the audience and often in theater you know the more that budgets got caught in British theater the tighter our time schedules became and we often had to open a show really when we hadn't finished doing the lighting nothing was quite ready but we made a contract with the audience they had bought a ticket they had arranged that evening they're going to come so we really only in a disaster would you cancel you know they come um which is why when things do get cancelled it's not great um but yeah so I'd say collaboration then the lives that devoted it's really important that those people get celebrated um so that's why the book starts with a kind of invocation and I read their names upstairs actually like designer Jason Burroughs bit freaked out he walked out there and he heard his name being read out um so their names are being read they're being invoked they're being thanked for being part of this um and also I wanted to talk about what it means to collaborate there's a few things going on there a lot of people who work with the intensity that we work are there's reasons why we choose this path I mean any of you are here who work all night and you know devote yourselves I mean you can unpick your own personal reasons for why you're doing it but often it's a way of finding a new family um it's a way of having quite intense relationships through your work you know those choices have been made like someone asked me yesterday you know what was which piece has been the most fun and I could only quote Noel Coward who says work is more fun than fun because I can't remember what had fun but had fun this morning but but generally I find work is more fun than fun and that's true probably of a lot of the people who work on these things so what the overlapping voids and apertures mean is a number of things at once they're talking about overlapping perspectives there is just this chink of Venn diagram where my perspective the perspective of the engineer the director the musician recording artists just about overlap just about sometimes you have to squint to find it so there's that piece but there's also all of our needs the best work is made because it was needed to be made and I'm not saying it comes from a pain or a loss or a void but it comes from some kind of drive doesn't it it comes from somewhere it comes from seeking a seeking a telescope a magnifying glass a seeking a curiosity and there was a wonderful interview with Mark Rylands the director sorry the actor director and the interview was asking him how do you cope with the death of your stepdaughter who tragically died do you fill the void with art he said no you can't fill a void with art but you can garden plant around its edges you can embroider around the void or the loss or the pain whatever it is and there's a sense of that I think in those I sort of wrote in the front of the book I tried to fill a void with art but actually what I was doing was not that I was encircling it and that's sort of what that open piece is about so this almost 30 year practice you've been telling us about and sharing stories with us what does it mean at this point to now take a moment to look back at it through the creation of the book through the exhibition upstairs what has that done for you and for your practice at this moment I'm really glad I did it I'm really glad it's done I have my children and my husband over there there's a book done yet because literally the writing of the book because I don't normally write I write a little bit I like writing but to write and I really wanted each work to be valuable and to be worthwhile and I wanted to try and trace not just my 30 year period I didn't think it was really that relevant to just write what I've done I thought it was more interesting if I could somehow thread what has happened over 30 years in my town in my country a little bit in the world how we've all gone on a journey in 30 years and yet I could only write about it from my very personal perspective um so I could only write my own story but I wanted to try to draw those threads in and there was an interesting examples for example in 2005 I did a production of a play called Hecuba Euripides Greek tragedy which had been written by Euripides centuries and centuries ago to really as a warning against war they'd just come out a period of of wars that had been devastating and it was a way to the earliest forms of Greek theater were really a way to help an audience feel what it would feel like that's what it was for it was for empathy it was that's what it was for so when Hecuba cries over her lost son the audience it's particularly designed to make the audience feel what it will be like if they lose their son and to encourage them to not want to go to war that was the point that's why he was writing those and of course there was it wasn't by chance that we were doing Hecuba with Vanessa Redgrave who's a massive pacifist activist anti-war we were all demonstrating on the streets in the in the throes and in the wake of the Iraq wars the ongoing Iraq wars which was still ongoing and 2003 2004 obviously and five productions it turns out when I was googling it researching for the book there were five productions of Hecuba in and around the UK I didn't realize that at the time but a lot of us were doing that play because we were trying to understand that moment in time the dissonance of being in a country that we called our country but that was doing something we really didn't believe in I mean the march against the Iraq war and the disillusion with that that great hope we'd had of the new labor government and we were so disillusioned that they were suddenly not with us and I mean everybody went on that march it was the hugest march that ever happened I remember going march here because Hecuba came to Washington that play and then we the the writer Tony Harrison the poet who'd done the translation of it we had done quite an abstract version in London when we came here he said come we have to just go in and do something different so we made it's in the book this concentric circles like an epic hours kind of Greek theatre of army tents but we went to army surplus shops in in Virginia and they all had sand in them and we made this thing of them and it was very immediate very immediate so I wanted to try and find those threads and I to be honest with you I never would have I didn't know what my practice was as a whole when I went the final room which is very much the work of Maria Nick and all who's sick of me telling this story but it's the case because it came together quite late when we realized we didn't perhaps have too many copies of the book available so we decided to paste it around the war of the final room but for me it's very emotional to see the book all unfolded like that because it wasn't until I made the book and the exhibition that I had seen my practice all together things had happened in time they'd happened sort of written in sand washed over the next day pieces gone back into inventory all of those bits of truss and lighting they went back to the warehouse the bits of wood went on to be other things everything is in flow and in flux so to have them all crystallized beats all together it's the first time I've seen my practice and I wanted to show it to everybody like that it's quite it's quite medicinal makes me feel less fermented where do you see your practice heading in the future well I think this is a good moment at the slides I would like to do those drawings these were the ones of the Nevada species in the sphere but the first ones of the London species it came about when asked to do a piece about London I asked the London wildlife trust what would be the best thing to do and they said well there's 15,000 species of Londoners and only one is human and if you can make a habitat for some of these endangered species in the human imagination you'll be doing the best that an artist or designer can do for the problem of extinction of species because we can deal with all sorts of other habitats but the human imagination needs rooms in it with the names of these animals because if we don't have a habitat in our human imagination there isn't much hope for it in the wider planet so I would like to draw the species of New York I'm just manifesting it and make a big beautiful dome in Central Park I'm hoping that might happen hopefully before this ends we never know or after because I spent four months making these drawings of individual species and I learned so much I learned about my own physiology I learned you know that my hand relates to the knuckles relate to the knuckles on a bird's wing that the veins relate to the veins in a bat's wing I felt so I felt continuous I had read a lot about the philosophy of continuity of self from a human into the biosphere from humans into every other human I'd read about it but it took practice I had to practice it to learn and really feel it and these you know four months drawing every day really helped me feel that and that's what I'd like to continue to do and probably write a bit more about it as well I think that'll be the focus of the practice moving forward we would all read your words and come look at any of that so I want to open it up to questions from all of you who's going to kick us off we have one bj all right I met bj upstairs and I said please have a great question thank you bj I asked some of you out some other people to get good questions I hope you've yeah you yeah sorry bj was a question don't give him the dud mic yeah hello hey bj hi thank you for an incredible exhibition and for this talk and for sharing this time with us I mean I have a lot of questions about your studio about magic nature architecture but if I have one question I'm curious about trust in your practice because you do collaborate with some such a wide variety of people and you tend to do work that of course is somewhat unconventional within the fields that you're practicing how do you develop that trust so that you can say I'm going to break the rules here and you know six months from now or however many years from now this work is going to be worth your trust in me as a designer and yeah well a really good question and your other two unasked questions were also good about magic the studio and trust and what there's trust obviously in both directions in all three right there's trust in my studio my studio trusting me all of us all of us trusting magic and the people who favor it trusting us not to fuck it up right I think that's what you're asking um so the last piece which was the one you prioritized our answer first um everything is a prototype there's a phrase that I'm slightly misquoting from TS Eliot um always finding words for things we no longer need to say so if we've worked out how to do it then we don't want to do it anymore because we've done it so everything is a prototype and there's a really um explicit example a concrete example of that which I'll describe to you because I think it's more interesting if I give you concrete examples um the the first concert that Adele did after taking five years away from making music making music but not being the public eye was a radio city musical in this city and I went in there and I thought it'd be really interesting to project over the whole shell the whole beautiful surface of that theatre and then just cut a hole in the projection and have her in there so I said let's do that it was for one night only show I think we had an overnight to set it up and everybody in the building said absolutely not absolutely not this will not work the union thing you won't anyway that wouldn't work and also um it just won't show on camera it's going to cost a lot of money and it won't work and I said yeah but can we still do it because I have a feeling it will work I said that will you go I said yeah I think it'll work based on my experience based on things I have done I think if you put ton of projectors up there it will be awesome and we should do it and it's the best thing to do so maybe maybe maybe not and then I remember I wish I remember I don't know if any of you like this I always remember phone conversation by what I'm looking at when the phone call comes because I think we're all synesthetic we probably all do that but it was really cold I was at dinner in break ends actually because we were busy working on the next opera um uh the uh Carmen on the lake in break ends big hands coming out the lake and I'm in this little restaurant it's really cold and uh it's noisy in the restaurant and I get the call from Adele's manager and I'm like this is the call I've got to convince him get the projectors so I step out it's freezing I'm wearing just a little t-shirt it's freezing it's snowing and I'm looking at the nice sparkling lights inside this restaurant he goes right so you know everyone's saying this won't work it's going to cost you know half million pounds it's not going to work why do you want to do it and I said because I think it'll work he said can you guarantee it I said absolutely not it's never been done so I can't guarantee it when will we know if it works I said on the day he said you really want it I said really think we should do it okay so we did it and of course from that every show has projection now all the rocket shows has projection and there's the sphere which is basically a version of that but that was trust he trusted me so that's that one magic I just have to tell can I tell my magic story this is a good story so there's a site of ham magician and he's called avid abram and he's also an eco philosopher geophilosopher and one day he is doing coin and card tricks at a restaurant in massachusetts and the owner of the restaurant gets quite a lot of complaints over the over the weeks and he eventually comes he said five different people have complained and they said that you must be spiking their drinks because when they leave the restaurant the the sky is a really vivid blue really vivid and the cracks in the pavement are really kind of dancing around an interesting way so I mean I wouldn't have come to you with this but five different people have complained you know and david abram says when you destabilize people's expectations about how coins and cards behave then you destabilize their expectation about how blue the sky might be and about how interesting the cracks in the pavement might be and they don't look anymore with their preconceived idea of what the blue is going to be they actually look and when you really look with your senses instead of with your judgment and your preconceptions then the sky is bluer than you thought so magic is really important and trusting magic and for me magic becomes technology because whenever I use technology I never go oh I want to use that new AI thing I just go how can I make this magic and someone who knows how to use the technologies of I know how to do that and then the last piece about trusting the studio and the studio trusting me that's a really important piece so in our studio which you wanted to ask about so I'll ask the question myself the in the studio there are six of us and it's in my front room at the moment it's about to move out but it's very small and obviously we work with lots of people beyond I just made a point and never say obviously again because it sounded so crap I'm not gonna say obviously anymore slightly obviously they work in my room and there are a lot of other people working on the other projects but they have to I'm very conscious that they give every day to me to the to the practice they come in so I really need to make it worth their while I'm really conscious of making each day worth their while and we we also are very conscious of we can't account for every emission carbon emission of all the projects we do yet but we can account for our own emissions so each day they come into the studio for every person as they work in the studio two trees are planted every day and there are eight girls that are every day given skills training in Malawi and 46 girls a year are fed clothes and educated in a boarding house that we built so we are really engaged with trying to mitigate the emissions of our own studio we've done quite a lot of calculation at the flights me being here the heating all of that stuff and we are vegetarian meals every day so we try and make it a place where when they come to work they're not just being part of what we make but they're being part of a practice that is really trying to account for itself and add a budget of carbon as well as all the other budgets we worked together on there's a million other things to say about the studio but that's a piece of trust between us yeah i see another question back here we can hear you fine yeah oh for the video she got the mic hi how are you what's your name hey bon don't worry what's your name other girl what's your robs where you're gonna get after this one so if one's gonna pass it to you if on go for it i like your style thank you um first of all thank you so much for this lecture i was really inspired and i was really curious about your experience between transitioning from a designer for other people's stories and texts into i would say a curator or creator of your own original ideas and texts and how did you find that experience or transition it like do you find it difficult or do you find it more like this is what you want to do things like that yeah that's a really good question of all thank you so much um i think in a way i've been telling my own stories a bit through religion with other people's stories always um but when i was probably at a stage where i could have just said right i'm going to go to art school that i'm just going to paint and make my own stories or paint my own sculptures i didn't feel i had enough to say right you're wrongly i don't know but i was faced with a really clear choice there was a white room that was empty and that was i had done so much education i've done my english degree i'd done a now a you know foundational art course i had done this two-year postgraduate well i've done the art course and there was a choice to go into another four-year degree and just make art and i looked at that white room and i i looked at the people around me who were going to be in the other white rooms and they were so sure of what they wanted to say and i just wasn't and i didn't feel that the materials that i would be using would be used in a valid way i didn't feel i had enough i thought i'd be mustering up things to say somehow and i was just still wanting to learn still wanting to be curious and i guess through now having learned by being every day and what i do i consider an education i'm reading every day i'm meeting people every day i feel like now now i feel ready to say something only now but i didn't i didn't want to say it before i had something you know i mustered it up it took time so i didn't want to just you know say i'm an artist i'm gonna say something i wasn't ready um but the transition now which actually began in 2016 really became i think because of the reading i had done i had read Naomi Klein's book this changes everything in 2013 and i felt the urgency of the time i guess as well i felt the urgency of the climate crisis the civilizational crisis which are absolutely entangled with the climate crisis i just had learned enough and then i felt the urgency well i need to say something it's great to do these plays it's great to do these concerts this is all great but actually the resources that are going into them i must use these resources for this purpose so i felt driven i guess at that point and the transition to answer your point directly has been i haven't found it hard it seemed quite natural actually and i've felt a lot of support from audiences such as yourselves who have been supportive of of me making that transition thanks for the question great question robbs is it robbs yes hi hello okay so um thank you so much for sharing your time and your words and your thoughts it's been really lovely to hear everything um i'm wondering especially early in your career how no and failure factored into your process and into your practice and how that's been incorporated into your work these are such great questions top questions um really lovely question thank you um yeah i mean i made a lot of really crap work really crap i just didn't put upstairs in the book but there's a lot of rubbish i mean i've made a lot of work so it was really not good so you just have to go out there make some crap stuff and and the great thing about you know everything we're talking about the joy of collective experience we all know that when theater is bad my god is it bad and when you sit through your own work with your own friends and family and it's just cringe making me bad and then at the end you come out and no wants to look at each other because it's so crap or they say the set was good and you're like well yeah the rest of it was crap or you know that didn't really work um you know it's it's unforgettable when things are bad and and it burns into your soul and you never want to feel like that again so it's a really great driver to try and learn from the mistake you i don't want to i don't want to feel like that again because there's a real responsibility in each piece it's not just a work for you if it's crap you just put on the floor no you spend people's money and you spend people's time you've invited them all and the more i go on in my career the more people think oh it might be good she's done it and if it's crap i was like shit i didn't it was rubbish that that happens now it happened then um but you you will never just back to the other point about you know prototypes if you only make what you know will work then you will never grow and you won't grow the the the the form so you just have to know that there will be some crap stuff and people will forgive you for it they will forgive you for it because as long as you were endeavoring to do something new and that you know i had to deal with that although i used to be completely i would be weeping for days when i got a review that says as devins clunky said you know i mean it would crucify me at the beginning it was devastating humiliating you know um but gradually you just develop you become quite tough you have to be quite tough um so you just get you and you know that really if as long as you are moving forward as long as you are trying to grow learn share your learning help the community to grow if you're doing that truthfully honestly with a good heart and a good intention doesn't really matter if you fail along the way and people your community around you that's the most important things to have a community around you you'll be honest so well that was a bit shit but this bit was good i mean even the other night we were out with Dennis who came all the way to see if he's aware there was a bit crap and he said well there was one good moment in it it was worth it was worth the journey for that and you know we still make rubbish work now sometimes yeah we got a question right here um you've said a lot of great things tonight and what resonated with me the most was that you put meaning into every little thing that you do um so as another creative i just wanted to ask what gives that inspiration for you every single day because you've mentioned that you have a family and i'm sure you have a very busy schedule so how do you balance that and also inspire you to do something that's amazing that you do all the time that's a really good question tematha thank you um well the family because i've got a 16 year old girl and a 13 year old boy and they love to tell me when it's rubbish you know they just say oh mum you can't do that's terrible you know you know they love that and they they also say one thing they think things are good so and also so i see things through their perspective and they also bring references there's a lot of artists musicians that i'm not aware of they can come to me and say this is a really interesting artist you should listen to this um so i intertwine i mean in the way that i say work is more fun than fun my children are complicit in the practice they come in and out of the studio um but but also in terms of finding inspiration finding it is always about looking for meaning um and there's also a sense of responsibility to the materials because the stuff that i make is generally because of the nature of it being public because it wants to be expansive and to invite an audience in it's generally using quite a lot of materials so more and more i i just i feel a responsibility if i'm going to use that piece of word or that piece of mirror whatever it is it has to be saying something you know otherwise i feel guilty i just feel why did i waste that time those people's time more people as i progress and there's more more people coming you know i feel really responsible um but i never i never let it overwhelm me because i always know that as long as i'm curious then the people coming will also be curious it'll be worthwhile so i have a process that i really trust which is just to even really lay in process even like with us finishing this exhibition never never be in a panic about having to get something finished take the step back if you're rushing to get something but take the step back and go what does it actually mean and is it worth it the thing we're all rushing to finish if there's if it isn't quite gelling and isn't quite finished yet maybe it wasn't the right idea and it's never too late never too late in a process because it'd be better to have a sketch of the right idea than a really finished tightly done thing of an idea that wasn't actually right and you might but actually Lindsay another she's articulates things so well she says everybody collides with the work at a different time in a collaboration the collision with the work knowing what it is so a director or a designer if you work as a creative or any of your creative collaborators there's a moment at which they go oh i know what we're making up until that point they go well i'm doing my bit my bit my bit my bit i said oh i know what we're making now and that moment of collision with the work the thing that's going to be there and even upstairs there's a different moment where everybody get back mature i don't you're making you know but you i don't and it's useful that people come at different times is really useful because while people deepen the weeds of it there's somebody just floats and stuff so i know i know what it is so to really trust that different moment of collision with the work and i'd say i'm not what area do you work in tether uh ob plane to see evident in the 1630s just i'll find out later why don't maybe it's just where it sounds so we have time for one last question before i saw this hand up first right here in front thanks so much thanks for asking a question of course thank you for being here and having such a brilliant talk um so i'm so in awe of how sure you are in your decisions and in your designs for example the Adele entire set sign you said i know that's going to work i feel it when you were younger specifically when you're in theater school training for set design how did you develop that trust in yourself and that intuition or take that firstly and say hey i'm going to go with this idea this is such a good question so it's picking up on bj's point about trust um i mean i very i'll just say a tiny story which might be to the point i very confidently walk out of any building and turn with absolute confidence in the wrong direction every time my my family laugh at me because i'm never in any doubt is anyone else like that i think it's not that i have absolute confidence and you know and that's a dangerous thing because i might lead a lot of putting people with me in the wrong direction but i guess um i wasn't always like that at all i i tried to be truthful i tried to draw i i drew on things you know i i made decisions based on what i read based on i i learned a lot from people i mean that's the nature if you work in theater and you work with directors you work with light and designs you work with you you know i watched my little daughter pick up things and i was just i was just i was picking up everything i was learning learning learning copying copy copy copy copy there is no shaming copy i was copying everyone so that's i'm gonna say that next oh that that but that but i'm gonna do that so i learned learned learned and i and i exposed me the thing when i say upstairs every time i reach a fork in the road i take both paths and then take both again at the next division the more i divide and multiply the more i offer myself to the air i was just i realized later that a gas exchange device bifurcates many times expanded surface areas so it can be good at exchanging gases and i was just as a human doing that i was just trying to open myself to as much influence as possible and i think i'd been doing it since i was very young i'd been trying to put myself in situations and just absorb absorb absorb and i think that's the way to build i mean i wouldn't say i was certain when i said that thing to Adele's manager i wasn't certain i was certain that i wanted it to happen i was i could see in my mind's eye i wanted it to happen and i had enough experience with bits and pieces i'd done to to have a good hunch it would work and that's not unusual when you work in it again you and you you don't do any of this alone you're having a lighting design a video design i said do you think well you know there's a few people it wasn't just me um and and i think that's the other thing don't if ever you're not quite sure you're not gonna be sure you're not you're not gonna wake up tomorrow and be sure so don't don't have a go at yourself not being sure just hang out with some people ask what they think read some books do some research know that it won't come it might not be inside the answer if you don't know the answer probably you're probably not gonna know it you've got to just go and read don't you know don't sit they go why don't i know just go and ask some other people you know read read some more things see some more things draw some more into you is my advice that's what i did well thank you as thank you so please don't hesitate to have these