Artist Story: Bobby Benjamin

Please give a brief introduction to yourself and your artistic practice

I’m a visual artist, curator, gallery director and lecturer based in Teesside. In my practice I work predominantly with found objects and produce sculpture, painting and installation on themes of class, masculine identity and place.

As far back as I can remember I was always creative and had a lively imagination but my relationship with art stopped at pencil on paper – and I can’t particularly draw. At school I took art as an ‘easy option’ but still managed to fail it. I viewed art through such a narrow scope. I guess it was about access really. My dad used to sell used records, comics and books so I grew up experimenting with music, drawing and writing but I was never exposed to contemporary art. I remember the YBAs being on telly when I was a kid and, on seeing Tracey Emin’s My Bed, our mam declaring “that’s not art” and I guess I just took her word for it. I didn’t set foot in a gallery until I was 26 and when I did it opened up a whole new set of possibilities in terms of how I could express myself.

I started out studying photography but, despite enjoying the medium, never found it particularly accessible. It was an expensive practice and I was a poor man. Over time I became less interested in the photographic process and more interested in composing installations for my photographs. This led me to putting down the camera and moving over to the visual arts and my usage of the found object. The found object allowed me to create work without a budget and gave me a creative restraint that helped me harness my ideas. It was in equal measure practicality and politics.

I think there is a sentimentality and a romanticism in my work too, despite its gritty aesthetic, that I believe traces back to my childhood and my early interactions with art. I’m the youngest of eight brothers. The only other creative in my family was my eldest brother Gordon, who sadly died when I was young. Like I said, we never visited galleries, but our mam would spread out Gordon’s drawings on the dining room table and talk to me about him. I think it taught me to engage with art in quite a raw and visceral way.

One of my earliest memories was being out on the street with my friend Danny, we must have been four or five, and we were collecting junk: stones, sticks, broken pegs and plastic, and building a ‘boat’. All these years later and I’m still doing the same thing, except now I’m building ‘art’.

You make work using a great range of found materials. Do you go out looking for specific materials with a particular sculpture or painting in mind, or are you a bit of a hoarder, collecting anything and everything with a view to future repurposing?

It used to be that I’d just hoard materials. When I first left university, I took on a huge studio in an industrial estate, an area rife with fly-tipping. And so I’d amble around with my trolley, filling it with anything I deemed visually interesting and rolling it back to the studio. My workspace became a junkyard and I’d just lay things out on the floor and look for conversations between the materials. I still use this approach of laying everything out now, but my choice of materials is much more refined. When I select objects I question ‘what does it say to me?’, ‘what does it say about me?’, and so on.

It tends to be that I accumulate ideas at a faster rate than I can accumulate materials though, so while I keep an open mind, these days there are often specific things I’m looking out for.

I re-use materials or imagery in my work regularly, with certain objects becoming motifs or Easter eggs. Often, once I’ve connected with an object, I turn my attention to gathering more of the same. Working with found materials means that visually my work can look wildly different from piece to piece, depending on what I’m working with. Having particular materials that repeat within my work creates familiarity and offers an access point into the subject matter for the viewer.

Would you say your work is biographical either in terms of materials or subject matter?

I’ve always tried to reflect society through the study of self, and vice versa. I look to bring elements of myself, and the area where I live, into my work – often in very literal ways. In my self-portrait, Thick Artist, I thickened the paint with my hair shavings and nail clippings. In Vinny & Claire, a piece inspired by living next door to a prostitute and her boyfriend, I used the perforated steel sheet that the council used to board up their property. Sentence, a self-portrait partially obscured by alphabet magnets, was inspired by my difficulties in transcribing a letter to my incarcerated brother.

My work tends to reflect my own circumstances, and those circumstances are not necessarily unique or abstract. When I discuss my own life or circumstances, I’m inadvertently speaking for every other working class/underclass person navigating their way through life on a shithole estate in a post-industrial town too. Equally, when I talk about my area or about society in general, I’m talking about myself as one of its residents/members.

Footballs feature in many of your recent works, often the cheap, lightweight, plastic footballs many of us will have kicked around in the park or the street as kids. Why footballs, and why those footballs in particular?

The plastic footballs are so emotive – I must have gone through a hundred of them as a child. People feel a sense of nostalgia when they look at my work and, as an artist, I’m very aware of the power of nostalgia in creating a connection with the viewer – even though the work itself is certainly not nostalgic.

I also like the fact that they are the cheap alternative; a low-quality version of something else, which is something anyone growing up on a council estate will be familiar with – whether that be a knock-off tracksuit or a copied DVD. And, like most of my favourite art, those plastic footballs were completely useless. You’d volley one toward goal and it’d end up 20 yards behind you.

In recent years, as I’ve increased the scale of my work, I’ve often had to purchase materials. In an attempt to reconcile this with my found object approach, I’ve taken to only buying larger quantities of materials I’ve already found – and I find those plastic balls all the time.

I’m also very conscious of the environmental impact of my work. The balls are endlessly reusable and, in terms of transportation – an ever more prevalent concern for the post-Brexit art industry – the balls afford me alternative possibilities. I can rock up with a suitcase full of plastic footballs and a pump pretty much anywhere and create an installation or sculpture.

Text is another recurring element in your work, sometimes handwritten in marker pen or other times created from plastic alphabet fridge magnets. Is this also found material?

I see the text that appears in my work very much as a found object. I’ve always enjoyed reading graffiti at bus stops or wherever you spot it. I’m not talking about street art, but more the daubing of the uninitiated. I started making note of it a couple of years back and it turned into a whole project, with people sending me graffiti from their own estates too. It’s such a primal, uninhibited form of expression – someone pulled a pen out of their pocket and wrote the first thing that came into their mind on the backseat of the bus; or took out a key and scratched their love into the paint of a stranger’s garden gate – I find it fascinating. When I use it in my work it acts almost as an esoteric timestamp; you can gather when and where I made something by the graffiti I’m using. If you know, you know, kinda thing. Like the grammatically confusing ‘Carlin Hayes is grass’ that became a staple of a particular body of work made at a particular time; if you live round my end, you would have seen it everywhere.

I find it helps me make a connection with an area too. For example, when I had my solo exhibition, ‘Object’, at Vane, the text that found its way into the exhibition was almost entirely lifted from the bridge that I’d walk across on my way to the gallery each day.

Your work has been described as transient, with deinstallation of a work also marking its destruction. Why do you work in this way?

When I’m making art, the last thing on my mind is its saleability. I mean, I don’t know a lot of people who’d want a pile of finely balanced flat bar steel or a paving slab adorned with a half-eaten cheeseburger in their living room. So I never let it inhibit my thinking or creative process. My process tends to be to make it, show it, take it apart, make something new and so on. Hoarding old works just feels like vanity when I know the materials have so many more possibilities. And so the reusing of materials is about practicality and, at times, necessity. Often, when I make or install work it is designed site-specifically – so it’s also an issue of suitability.

I suppose that in an ideal world I’d have the space to store everything I ever made and a supply of materials sufficient to sustain my practice for eternity, but that’s not the case, so I’ve always leaned in the opposite direction. Once I’ve made a work, exhibited it and documented it, it has served its purpose and the possibilities of the objects become the focus once again. It’s an approach rooted in my upbringing; everything was reused, recycled or handed down.

Alongside your art practice you are co-director of Pineapple Black, a contemporary arts space in the centre of Middlesbrough, and you’ve started several other artist-led projects in the town, as well as worked on a number of collaborations and live events with creatives from other fields. How did you get so involved in facilitating these projects and what impact have they had on the art scene and the wider community in the area?

When I left university, I didn’t really see any provision for the emerging/early-career artist in Teesside. The way I saw it, my only options were to move away from my hometown or to spend my career applying to be in other people’s exhibitions and neither held any appeal, so I set about trying to create something tangible for artists in my position on Teesside.

I never really felt like part of the art world (or even an artist) back then, and that allowed me to think quite freely in my approach. I’d put on exhibitions in car parks, flats, abandoned buildings – wherever. Initially it was about creating a platform for myself and other artists like me, but also about connecting with a new audience. It was like everyone I knew was creative, but I’d see none of them at exhibitions or galleries – so I just tried to connect the dots. Much of it was about setting a different tone, getting people past the preconceptions or misconceptions they may have about what an exhibition was, or could be. Our relationship with culture is so hierarchical – the way we would consider going to the ballet more culturally significant than going to a football match – and it never sat right with me. I wanted to shake that up. That’s why when you visit Pineapple Black, you’ll find artwork on the walls, but also a dartboard.

I’ve founded three galleries and multiple arts projects, many of which are still active, and I find connecting those dots a really fruitful experience. I’ve worked with so many talented artists, established and emerging, over the last ten years and I learn and develop from each of those experiences – and hopefully the artists I collaborate with do too.

These days the art scene in Middlesbrough is buzzing and I’m really happy to have played a part in that.

You’ve often discussed your working class background with reference both to your own work and your role as an arts organiser. Why is class important and how does it manifest in your work and in your wider practice?

My upbringing, background and class are intrinsic to my creative approach. When I started roaming the alleyways and skips of Gresham for materials, or when I hung a show in a car park, it was because I had no money. And people related to it.

There’s no denying there’s a huge class imbalance in the arts – with only around sixteen percent working class representation. I still feel like a gate crasher now – imposter syndrome is a real thing! I think that there are barriers: lack of exposure to contemporary art, lack of industry entry-points for working class creatives, etc. Crucially, there’s a lack of working class curators and directors in galleries leading to working class narratives being, at best, explored in a clumsy, ham-fisted manner or, at worst, not being explored at all. I’ve been very fortunate; I’ve been able to hold my breath long enough that I’ve managed to turn my passion for art into a career. If I can use my work to highlight these issues, or if I can use my curatorial practice to help remove these barriers – then that’s something I want to do. Things are getting better but there’s work to do on both sides.

Do you have any particular memories of your experience of working with Vane?

Vane has always been a gallery that excited me, and I’ve long been conscious of the work they do with emerging artists. It was an ambition of mine to show with them for ages and having the first show in their beautiful new space in Gateshead was an honour.

I work in quite an unconventional way, even for an artist, and when I arrived on show week with no actual work but just a van full of scrap materials, I sensed a slight trepidation from the directors, Chris and Paul. But they put their trust in me and my curatorial ideas and gave me a level of creative freedom that allowed me to work instinctively with the space and fully realise my vision for the show.

The passion and professionalism from the team at Vane was evident from the moment I arrived, and they helped unload the van, ’til the day the show closed and I received a copy of the stunningly captured photographic documentation by Colin Davison. It was one of my favourite creative experiences and an invaluable opportunity to build my profile and portfolio.

Interview by Stephen Palmer

Read more about Bobby Benjamin’s exhibitions at Vane.