Mr. Houseago, over the course of your career, you’ve explored painting, drawing, and installations, but you’ve always come back to sculpture as your primary medium. Why?
I guess because it’s just absurd. Every object in your life right now, I guarantee you, 99.9% of the time, it has a use, right? It’s a table, it’s a seat, it’s a light it’s your phone. It cooks or it protects you from the rain or whatever, right? Art sculpture, particularly, is an object that is pointless. It’s particularly offensive to people. At least a painting hangs on the wall, it’s a painting. But when people react to sculpture, it’s like, “Why the hell are you doing this?” It upsets them in a unique way — and I love that. You have to be right on the edge of crazy to do this.
One could argue that your recent immersive sculpture Cosmic Snail (Shell Temple) has a spiritual or mystic use, no?
These big installations are a more hidden side of my practice, these environments, these places. You’re right that they are spiritual, and they’re also more architectural in that you move through them. This one you mentioned is a sort of temple you go inside, and then you can either leave through the way you came, or you can go back out in it, through it. It’s very weird. I didn’t get to see it in its full size until the opening of my exhibition Journey at Xavier Hufkens and seeing it in person was very special. I’m not a snail or a shell guy, but when I was struggling with my mental health, a friend of mine, Danny Smith, he’d told me to think of it like I’m at the center of a shell, and you have to walk into the darkness to come out the other side — you have to be the one to decide to do that. And that comment saved my life. So when I came into the gallery space and saw that for the first time, it was unsettling, because I hadn’t realized the importance that piece had until I saw it completed.
“I got to a point in my journey where I needed help, and that doesn’t diminish my art or my creative process. My journey now deals with immense joy and love and power.”
You mentioned your mental health struggle several years ago… Apparently during that time, you stopped making art all together. How was it to come back to art after that break?
It took a long time to come back. When you go through the kind of trauma work that I did, it becomes more about: will you survive day to day? Week to week? It’s about survival. You’re not really thinking about art. The art making in my past was a way of surviving my trauma, which was very early trauma related to sexual abuse I experienced when I was young. I used sculpture as kind of like a pressure cooker on that. And obviously I didn’t want to go back to that way of dealing with my trauma. And it was actually that guy, Danny, who encouraged me to reframe art making and reframe creativity and not just give it up as a uniquely trauma experience. Returning to art and realizing that art could be a really healthy way to deal with that story… It’s become very important for me to talk publicly about how trauma can get you trapped.
Georg Baselitz says that art should actually only come from misery and suffering.
Right, it’s like the Van Gogh mannerism that trauma and sadness and madness lead to good art. I don’t think that’s true. I think a lot of artists have trauma. A lot of humans have trauma. But I think it’s also okay to get help for that trauma. Your madness, it makes your art good, but then it kills you. I don’t really believe we have to do that story anymore. I got to a point in my journey where I need help, and that doesn’t diminish my art or my creative process. My journey now deals with immense joy and love and power.
Did you ever worry that your art rooted in love and joy wouldn’t be as successful as your art based around trauma?
No, because they’re both connected. In some moments, you’re repressing your trauma, you’re living in a muted way, and sometimes you’re really feeling your trauma. When you go through that journey, you become more fully engaged with the whole spectrum of what it is to be human. I think I can make much more frightening or disturbing art now, but I do it with self-awareness and agency. I know when to stop and pull back. I have practices which enable me to kind of ground myself again. If you work from your most authentic, most vulnerable, most real self… It’s complicated.
I can definitely sense that full spectrum of emotions coming through in your sculpture work: the solitary man of Giant Striding Figure, the sharp vibrance of Joy Flowers, even the friendliness of your large wooden eggs…
I move between different states when I’m making the work. Say I’m watching the news, right? And there’s some horrible news about about Epstein’s victims or whatever other scandal — I’m a victim of sexual abuse, I’ve lived through that, and so that causes me to feel something, to be triggered or to have a flashback; I’m going to make my work about that. I’m not going to go to the studio and say, “You know what? I’m a guy that just makes flowers.” I don’t believe in that. I can process a complex human thing, I can look at it and put it in my work and handle it. There’s a form of survival in that. There’s a form of victory in that over that. But a week later, I can also look at a flower and think it’s beautiful. You get to have these moments of joyous awareness of how lucky you are to be alive, to feel okay, to have survived. I want to be able to show all of that.
One thing I noticed in your latest pieces is a sense of completion that I think wasn’t as present in the past. Your older sculptures had pencil lines and exposed rebar, a key part of your style that made them seem almost unfinished and very vulnerable.
That’s right, yes. I think the “unfinished” works almost showed the state I was in. I was jumping in, jumping out, trying to avoid my feelings, my trauma. I was dipping in and out, I was being chased by it, I was escaping from it. Whereas now, I think I’m sitting in it, I’m in the discomfort. And now, I think, certainly with Cosmic Snail (Shell Temple), for example, I’m sitting with my emotions, I’m not trying to pretend or deflect. I think I’ve become more utopic.
What do you mean?
If we could put creativity into the center of our existence as humans, we can create, quite literally, paradise on earth. I truly believe that. And I believe that art is a route, a very open-ended route to a much more sacred experience of being alive. We live in a massive cosmic mystery! We look out at the stars, the moon, it’s just an incredible mystery, right? And I think if we could place that at the center of our existence — socially, politically — we would be able to create a much more beautiful world, I’m certain of that.