HudsonMackay Gallery chats to Spudd about art, lomography and his love for music

December 2009

HM ~ When did you first become interested in art?
S ~ When I look back, I was always drawing as a kid. I used to draw from comic books, Judge Dread and 2000AD, that kind of thing. It just continued from there. I still spend a lot of time doodling and drawing.

HM ~ How did you get into photography?
S ~ I remember Supa-Snaps giving away reusable cameras sometime when I was a kid and I took to it instantly, snapping away at everything. That fascination soon petered out once I realised my parents couldn't afford the film and processing costs this entailed. There was also a big box of loose photographs and a couple of old photo albums that I remember looking at and my parents had a chunky old Polaroid camera lying around not in use and I really enjoyed playing about with it, but not in a photographic way, more taking bits of it apart. I think I eventually broke the poor beast. My first proper introduction to photography was doing an NC when I was in Fifth year at school. A couple of years after leaving school, still not knowing what I really wanted to do and unemployed I signed up to do the same NC through a training for work type. That was in 1995. There was a job club there and from that I got a job in the photo mini-lab in Jessops. Most of my photographic education came from there and it sparked my interest in the process as a whole, especially accidents and mistakes. I always found the fogging that appeared on some customers' film interesting and I used to print them, making multiple copies with different colour values and densities. There are stacks of 6x4 prints stored away in my archives of random fogging and prints made from the very beginning of the film, the heavily fogged part that is black to the eye but when put in the negative carrier of a Noritsu photo printing machine and blasted with light does appear to transmit some amount of light through it. There is also a collection of customers' prints that I thought were cool or funny or just weird that I took a copy of for myself, nothing creepy like in the movie 'One Hour Photo', just randoms. I always thought it would be a great idea to put on an exhibition of all those oddities of other peoples photographs.

HM ~ Did that lead you into taking objects and making photograms/contact prints?
S ~ Yeah. It inspired me to experiment with light and gave me a good knowledge of printing and what is possible. I just transferred my experiments from the mini-lab to the darkroom. I am always looking for objects to make photograms from. Anything with a good shape, I used bread once, you know, a proper square of sliced white. The light going through the bread produced a pretty funny texture. I produced a series of 6 different coloured prints and made a rudimentary cube from them using photo clips, it was a very silly and pointless pop art project. 3D objects are good, the way they bend the light it really special, I much prefer something translucent than something solid although a mixture of the two is often effective. Next I'd like to try making contact prints of photocopies of objects just to see what effect that gives. I just need to find access to a colour dark room now that the one at Glasgow Met is, sadly, no more.

HM ~ Your favourite project so far?
S ~ It has to be the Lomography project I did while studying photography. I travelled to the Lomography factory in Vienna and shot the whole adventure on a couple of different multi lensed and novelty cameras from www.lomography.com, when I got home I spent ages (2 months) working on the hundreds of images and turning them into a 3 1/2 minute animated mega mini movie. That was both fun to do and pleasing with the results. This is something I'd really love to expand upon. I have hundreds of lomographs of traffic lights from a previous project that are just crying out to be given the mega-mini-movie treatment.

HM ~ Tell us about the inspiration behind your self-portrait.
S ~ I've always been one for dressing up. I wanted to get the most interesting outfit I could find. I remember years ago I had a dressing up box and would try on silly outfits to make my Mum and Dad laugh. I had all the bits lying around my flat, I've got so much tat in my flat and loads of random clothing too. The dress and feather boa were a birthday present from an ex-girlfriend. I've now got a collection of 5 dresses, which have all been worn in the past at various outdoor parties and random events. The mask was a gift from me to another ex-girlfriend; I bought it in a flea market in Amsterdam. I was using it as a prop for a college project and when I got my hands on those gloves the whole outfit came together beautifully.

HM ~ Where did you get those rubber gloves?
S ~ I ordered them while I was working in the kitchen of a bar-diner in the west end. I needed something to protect my skin while I did the washing up and cleaning. I've suffered from eczema all my life and working there really aggravated it on my hands. It got really nasty. I had to work through my last year at college with inflated fingers and painfully peeling paws. I even took lovely photocopies of my big scabby flippers and made contact prints of them, as you do. They actually sent out 6 pairs of the gloves, so I got two, one for work and one for home. They're great for cleaning up in, although you can't pick up objects very easily in them, things tend to go flying! They've seen a lot of very silly action those gloves have, they come in handy as a great photographic prop.

HM ~ Music is really important to you isn't it?
S ~ Yes, very important. When I was growing up I was always listening to my Dad's records, some of which I now own. I began DJing in 1994, electronic stuff, techno, hip-hop and dub. I think I would really enjoy writing for a music magazine as I make up so many different names for different genres and sub genres of music. I'm part of a collective known as Radar. A small group of us started putting on outdoor parties and DJing at house parties around 1996-97 but we had no identity, it was just a fun thing to do. As this progressed more people came on board and we got a regular Thursday night gig in Glasgow, in the now notorious X-Bar on Charing Cross (between the Koh-i-nor and Chinaski's, that's another story entirely and I know someone who has written a book featuring said bar) from there we got a regular monthly night at the Glasgow School of Art and kept at that for a few years. We've not done much recently because of other commitments and folks starting families, but we do get together to put on parties every once in a while. It's our 10th birthday soon and we've got something special in store for that. I now make my own music either on computer or using a little Korg sequencer/sampler unit that I sing and make noises through. It's a bit of a work in progress and is pretty stupid. Over the last two years I've taught myself to play the bass and I've been messing about with a very oddly tuned ukulele for the last 3 years or so. Hopefully someday it'll all come together and I'll have the bottle to try it out on an audience.

HM ~ Why did you decide to join HudsonMackay?
S ~ I saw it as a great opportunity to raise my profile as an artist and get my work seen by a wider audience. There's a good mix of different artistic media and within that a wide range of styles. I think that there's loads of variety on the website and it's looking pretty smart.

HM ~ Thanks for your time Mr Spudd.