Interview with a House Plant is a re-enaction of a celebrated 1985 television interview between Melvyn Bragg and the painter Francis Bacon. I take on the role of Bragg, while Bacon is played by a house plant.
My work stages irrational behaviours, actions and thought-processes. Works often follow absurd logic (e.g. changing my t-shirt to match the colour of trains passing behind me), or enact absurd premises (e.g. spending 6 months visiting a museum in order to repeatedly look at the same painting – hoping that it might start providing some meaning to my life), or interact with the world in ways that are simply “wrong” (playing a game of table-tennis against nobody).
By playfully breaking certain rules and conventions in ways which might be understood as “irrational” or “absurd”, I investigate the implications of causing “minor-ruptures” to normality, aiming therefore to reveal something of the structure of sense itself.
I’m also interested in exploring the mechanics of humour as a tool with which boundaries of normality and sense can be transgressed. Even if only momentarily humour allows conventional thought patterns to be reconfigured, allowing access to potentially subversive realms of thought and action.
Interview with a House Plant – TRT 13:00 mins
Dave Ball (b. Swansea, UK, 1978) is an artist and writer based in Berlin. He holds an MA in Contemporary Art Theory from Goldsmiths College, London and a BA in Fine Art from the University of Derby, UK. Through his cross-disciplinary practice, Ball explores the notion of a “rupture of sense” at work in various modes of seeing, thinking and behaving, and particularly as it is manifested in humour. Recent works include an absurdist-existentialist video investigation into landscape “Being Somewhere”, and an ongoing drawing project “A to Z”, which aims to produce a drawing for every noun in the English dictionary, starting at “a”. A current curatorial project is “Ha Ha Road”, a humour-themed group exhibition showing at Oriel
Dave Ball – Berlin Germany