Glasgow-based artist David Shrigley is looking forward to his Auckland residency, he tells Stephen Jewell
"It's going to be a family reunion mixed with work." Since his sister moved to the North Shore in 1999, David Shrigley has been a frequent visitor to New Zealand. But the Glasgow-based visual artist is making his first professional trip to these shores when he takes up a five-week stint as the International Resident Artist at Two Rooms as part of the Auckland Arts Festival.
"My Mum and Dad will be there as well," he says. "They live in England, but I don't see them all that often. But Auckland's a nice place to hang out in, so it's nice to have the opportunity to hang out there for a month or so and to make an exhibition and see my family."
As he is usually based in Birkenhead when he is in Auckland, Two Rooms' Newton location will represent a refreshing change of scenery.
"The interesting thing for me is that this will be my first ever experience of central Auckland," he says. "My experience of Auckland up till now has been driving to the Glenfield Mall and taking my nephews to water polo. So it will be my first experience of staying in the city, which I've never really gone to that much."
Describing Two Rooms as "a shed-type of building that's been purposely renovated", Shrigley believes everything he needs will be right at hand.
"The gallery is in a slightly industrial area, so it's all tyre-fitting places and McDonald's drive-throughs," he laughs. "It's a little bit out of the way but there's a little cafe and an art supply place just around the corner."
Steps by David Shrigley. Photo / Sam Hartnett
Having not determined exactly what he'll be producing beforehand, Shrigley will essentially be making it up on the spot.
"I'm going to make work for the show in the studio and whatever I do in the time will be exhibited. But I think I want to do something with oil paint because it's quite difficult. The thing about it is that you need a very dust-free, clean environment to work in because otherwise you get dust stuck to your drying oil paint, which is really annoying. But I figure this space will work well in that regard in the way that my usual space in Glasgow will not. It's sort of an experiment, but I like to make things while I'm travelling and it gives a certain raison d'etre to the whole project."
Having spent most of his childhood in Leicester in the English Midlands, the 46-year-old has lived in Scotland since he was a student at Glasgow School of Arts in the late 1980s, and admits he is now mostly known as "a Scottish artist".
Sometimes categorised as outsider art because of its offbeat viewpoints and purposely limited technique, his work is often described as almost childlike in its conception, although Shrigley begs to differ.
"To be really honest with you, I don't really know. I just make the work and you go into a certain zone when you do that. There's a certain type of work I want to make, and certain types of images and a certain relationship between those images and the text.
"There's a certain otherness maybe in the appearance of the work I'm striving for but I can't really articulate that until I've arrived at it.
"I've spent 20 years as a professional artist making that work so to talk about a faux naivete or whatever is something that really doesn't ring any bells with me."
Nominated for the Turner Prize in 2013, Shrigley started out selling photocopied pamphlets of his early material at his local pub. Now with his work just as likely to be seen gracing a T-shirt or an album cover as hanging on the wall of an art institution, the accessible nature of his output is still important.
"What I do is meant to communicate very directly as it uses the same language as the advertising and posters that plaster your visual environment all the time," he says. "It's using a language that already exists in a way, albeit it's my take on that."
Good by David Shrigley. Photo / Sam Hartnett
With his bold lines and almost sticklike figures, Shrigley seems to have much in common with comic book artists.
"I've always been fascinated with cartoons and comics but I've never really been interested in that genre. My heroes are Andy Warhol and Marcel Duchamp rather than [Ghost World artist] Daniel Clowes, for example.
"When I look at graphic novels, I find them very beautiful but what I'm really interested in is just the graphic communication, the way you have all these graphic devices like speech bubbles and the way the image and text will work together. I look at them in a way like how an autistic person looks at human interaction.
