ARTISTS TALKING

It was built in the mid-nineteenth century as part of the Pullens Estate, a philanthropic housing initiative to provide homes and workshops for the artisan community around the Elephant and Castle.

Where our workshop is, is of as much significance as what it is, because for the last twelve years we have been searching out neglected or overlooked architectural sites as the basis for a body of performance and installation work. The workshop itself does not function like a traditional artist's studio; we make very little in it. It is, rather, a repository for fragments of memorabilia from past projects. Objects that hold the germ of an idea or stand in for unwieldy or part formed theses that cannot easily be disposed at the local amenity refuse tip (which is, incidentally, around the corner from Peacock Yard).

Our present project Trans Mittere 1413 kHz, a large installation commissioned by Liverpool Cathedral, shows all the signs of producing a new batch of sacred objects that will need stabling in Kennington. Not least twenty-five 1940s valve radios and a 1979 Cosalt Safari caravan in which we have been living whilst on site.

Our practice produces so many objects largely because we tend to solve compositional problems by making things or finding things. In Liverpool we have just completed the construction of a twelve-metre-high wooden radio mast on top of the bell frame of the cathedral. Our major constructions are usually more practically than conceptually challenging. This image of 'transmission', of a building speaking for itself in its centenary year, was hoisted into position by Warburton Steeplejacks of Blackburn. It was a monumental day for the partnership – the day when the project settled and became concrete.

The paradox of these kinds of projects though, is that they rely on complex collaborations with the working populace of a building. However much we might crave the same anonymity and isolation as studio-based artists, we are forced into a very public discussion of very fragile ideas at an early stage as well as throughout a project. We like to think that this makes the ideas robust and well founded but the truth is much falls by the wayside. In Trans Mittere, which opened this morning, these casualties of open process include poultry cages, miniature cockspurs, a pair of port and starboard hand channel markers and a cloud chamber. Back in Kennington however the shelves are already full and so perhaps this natural wastage is for the best.

www.forster-heighes.org.uk