A conversation with Jack Killick, Abbey Fellow, in which he speaks about the work he has produced during his residency at the BSR from September to December 2024, ahead of the Winter Open Studios.
My practice continuously moves back and forth from painting and sculpture. The sculptures tend to be assembled from found materials and building waste which is then covered with cement or plaster. What was born out of a necessity to make work cheaply and easily from what I see to be free materials has become an increasingly important part of my methodology. The discarded objects I find act as starting points for the direction the work takes. It’s a form of assemblage akin to surrealist exercises in automatism where the subconscious is allowed to dictate the outcome of the work. The painting side of my practice also relies heavily on this automatic approach, yet they often take the form of landscapes, interiors or still lifes.
I came to Rome in September after a seven week residency at Hauser and Wirth gallery in Bruton, Somerset where I had been making a body of sculptural work using waste materials found in the area. It was in thinking about the idea of spolia, the practice of harvesting parts of a building or ruin to build another, that led me to consider my sculptural practice in a much broader context and look to Rome, a city rich with examples of spolia, as a place in which to immerse myself.
My time here so far has been spent looking at a vast number of ancient ruins in and around Rome as well as numerous medieval churches that were built using materials plundered from the ruins of antiquity. Perhaps not entirely unpredictably, the paintings I have been making have started to share some of the qualities of the frescoes I have seen in places like Ostia and Tivoli as well as the Pallazo Massimo and Pompeii and Herculaneum.
I have also twice visited Casa Sperimentale in Fregene just outside of Rome. Also known as ‘Casa Albero’ or ‘Treehouse’, it was built by a family of Italian architects – Guiseppe Perugini, his wife Uga de Plaisant and their son Raynaldo Perugini in the late 60s and early 70s as a sort of built experiment. The intention was that the building would be movable or adaptable in some way to the owners needs so it speaks to my interest in architecture in flux and the modular as a method of construction.
For the open studio event in December, I plan to show a series of paintings I have made whilst at the BSR on days between site visits. They’re very new to me so I don’t know what to say about them but I know that everything I have seen in the last two months is in them somehow.
