Why do you make art?
Chris: Making art is like exhaling: it expels the demons from within.
Donna: To scratch that itch.
Who do you make it for?
Chris: I make it for itself.
Donna: Mostly for myself, but if someone else gets what I do then this makes me happy, so maybe I make it to share ideas too.
Do you have heroes? Is so, who, if not why not?
Chris: We don’t need another hero.
Donna: We don’t need to know the way home.
Do you plan out a piece or do you wing it?
Chris: For me, ‘planning’ and ‘winging’ are two black holes orbiting each other, and I’m trying to fly between them and absorb little bits on the edge of both without getting sucked into either.
Donna: I’m hopeless at winging it. I love to plan things out on paper and dream about it until inspiration hits and all the jigsaw pieces fall into place.
How do you know when you are finished?
Chris: It ‘tells me’ by the fact that it stops telling me it’s not finished.
Donna: When I look at the piece and I am pleasantly surprised.
What was the first exhibition/artwork you saw that blew your mind?
Chris: ‘Soft Construction with Boiled Beans – Premonition of Civil War’ by Salvador Dali, in an art book my father owned. I was four years old, and I was totally freaked out by the picture, however I kept going back and looking at it over and over again, but didn’t know why.
Donna: It was a poster of Boecklin’s ‘The Isle of the Dead‘ hanging up behind the door in my aunty’s toilet when I was a kid.
Name a recent exhibition that impressed you?
Chris: ‘Siegfried’s Mechanischen Musikkabinet’ an exhibition of antique automated musical instruments, Rudesheim am Rhein, Germany
Donna: ‘Lanterne magique et film peint’ a magic lantern and hand-painted film exhibition exploring 400 years of cinema, at the French Cinematheque, Paris.
If you could have any artwork in the world what would it be?
Chris: Your head on a plate…no only joking! Um, Marcel Duchamp’s head on a plate?
Donna: Boecklin’s ‘The Isle of the Dead‘.
