TheEYE

Marc Quinn remains best known for his sculptures cast from parts of his body. The first of these, Self (initially cast in 1991), was created with nine pints of his frozen blood. Yet, as this profile demonstrates, his art over the past decade has embraced an exciting and diverse range of materials, including lead, ice, wax, glass, frozen flowers and even DNA.

Stuart Brisley is perhaps best-known for his disturbing physical performances which pushed his body to extremes. But his work as an artist over four decades has embraced sculpture and installation, films and fictions, large-scale participatory projects and, most recently, the Web. Illustrated with archive footage and photographs, this profile of the artist explores his understandings of collaboration and community, of politics and the market, of humour and failure. At the centre of his diverse work are the essential qualities of what it means to be human. Brisley’s art remains challenging and provocative, not least in the recent project in which he has orchestrated works centred on a Museum of Ordure. The museum has a curator and a collector, and, at least as it was shown at the Freud Museum, London, an apparent display of human excrement.

In 1973 Michael Craig-Martin exhibited a glass of water on a shelf, together with a printed text, and called the work An Oak Tree. As the text explained, the artist had changed the glass of water into an oak tree. More than thirty years later, Craig-Martin creates – along with screen-savers, works on LCD monitors and conventional paintings – gloriously colourful environments with blown-up outline images of domestic objects. The conceptual and the rigorously material have been central to the artist’s complex development across four decades of work that is both intellectually demanding and austerely beautiful. At the same time Craig-Martin achieved an almost legendary status as a teacher at Goldsmiths, where he encouraged, among many others, Damien Hirst and Sarah Lucas. Richly illustrated with works and environments filmed in Bregenz and Dublin, as well as at notable exhibitions in England, this film profile outlines the career of one of today’s most innovative and influential artists.

Gavin Turk is a leading figure in British contemporary art. His 1991 degree show work Cave, a blue ceramic plaque commemorating his occupancy of a studio, and Pop, the waxwork figure of himself as Sid Vicious, are among the iconic artworks of the 1990s. His "self-portrait" signatures and his finely crafted sculptures of everyday objects (such as cardboard boxes cast in bronze) bring the commonplace into an art space and challenge the viewer to engage in new ways.

Malcolm Morley is one of the most significant and influential painters working today. Born in England but active in the United States since the late 1950s, Morley has developed an intensely individual vision embracing, but never determined by, autobiography, politics, psychoanalysis, myth, the visual culture of his time and the limitless potential of paint. Filmed as Morley works in his distinctive manner on a spectacular new canvas, this documentary features the artist's provocative reflections on his life, painting technique, influences and concerns. It also illustrates a wide range of his paintings from the earliest abstract works, through the painstakingly precise depictions of reproductions (on postcards, from travel brochures) of ships, contemporary scenes and Old Masters, to the catastrophe pictures of the 1970s. Paintings engaging with ancient cultures followed, and then works based on the cardboard cut-out aeroplane and boat kits which Morley has made since his youth. Most recently, he has returned to paintings of news photographs, exploring a striking and challenging new range of imagery.

This program looks at the distinctive work of the artist and portraitist Julian Opie, who is known for his use of deceptively simple and visually striking designs across a variety of different mediums

Lisa Milroy’s paintings are pleasurable and provocative, clear but complex, immediate and yet richly subtle. In 2001 many of her major works were brought together for an important exhibition at Tate Liverpool; this film, the first about her work, was made alongside that show. Her earliest works are depictions of everyday objects: shoes in serried ranks, collections of lightbulbs and household hardware. Later canvases explore the process of depicting images of people, blank facades of buildings, clichés of photographic landscapes. More recent work is looser and less apparently realist. Speaking about the development of her art from the early 1980s onwards, Lisa Milroy discusses how she uses the sensual and descriptive power of paint to express her unique ways of looking at the world. She reflects on the changes in her work; on the impact of Japan and its culture; on photography and time; and on the craft and process of painting.

Since the 1960s, when he was associated with British Pop Art, Joe Tilson has enjoyed international acclaim for the individuality and originality of his paintings, constructions, prints and multiples. All of his playful, engaging work is informed with ideas from literature, philosophy, ethnography and alchemy. Tilson's early work focussed on mass-market consumerism and politics. But he was soon disenchanted with mechanical methods of production and his art in the 1970s and 1980s employed hand-worked wood and metal in intriguing ways. Shot in and around the artist's studio in Cortona, Italy, this film was produced alongside Joe Tilson's first British retrospective at London's Royal Academy of Arts. He speaks engagingly about his career, his craft and many of his key works, including his most recent paintings. Inspired by the landscape surrounding his home in the Tuscan hills, these works use striking and vibrant colours in conjunction with text, and explore the enduring themes of sex, birth and death.

In a distinguished career since the mid-1970s, Tony Cragg has produced a strikingly diverse range of sculptures in the widest variety of materials. His prolific output embraces organic and industrial creations, abstract and near-figurative images, delicate, powerful, immediate and yet elusive forms. The sculptor, he says, “looks for all the forms that don’t exist.” Filmed in the UK and Germany, where Tony Cragg has lived since the early 1980s, this profile features works produced over the past twenty-five years for both gallery and public contexts. In interview, Cragg discusses his working methods, his fascination with different materials and his fundamental commitment to sculpture as an artform. He speaks of his passion for the significance of sculpture, for its oddities, its quirkiness and its potential discoveries in today’s overwhelmingly utilitarian world.

Science and Surrealism, ancient myths, Buddhism and feminism are among the frameworks of ideas important to Liliane Lijn’s art. In Paris at the end of the 1950s, in Greece and New York, and in England since 1966, she has worked with light, energy and movement, with archetypal shapes and unconventional materials to produce an art that is clear, complex and strikingly beautiful. Many of Liliane Lijn’s key drawings and sculptures are featured in this profile, which was filmed alongside an important reassessment of her work at the Mead Gallery. The Poem Machines and Koans of the 1960s and 1970s are considered as well as the ambitious “goddess” figures of more recent years. Liliane Lijn speaks passionately about the art she has made across four decades and that she continues, with great energy, to create today.

Boyle Family have worked together for more than 30 years producing an art that scrutinises and replicates fragments of reality. Mark Boyle and Joan Hills began making assemblages in the early 1960s. In 1964 they started their life-long project Journey to the Surface of the Earth, recreating randomly-selected parts of the world’s cityscapes and landscapes. This unique practice continued as Mark and Joan’s children Sebastian and Georgia increasingly worked with them. But Boyle Family’s art has also embraced performance, projections and light-shows, data collection and micro-photography. The aim is to embrace all aspects of an ever-changing world and to make us look, hard and long, at this world’s endlessly fascinating details. Works by Boyle Family were filmed for this profile at their 2003 retrospective at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh. The interview was shot in early 2005 a few weeks before Mark Boyle died from a heart attack.

From previously barren moorland in the Pentland Hills near Edinburgh, Ian Hamilton Finlay has created a unique garden as an encompassing work of art. Little Sparta is a magical combination of culture and horticulture, poetry and planting, philosophy and myth. Ian Hamilton Finlay began his work at Little Sparta in the mid-1960s. With friends and collaborators, around a group of old farm buildings he has fashioned landscapes, streams, bridges, glades, lanes, bowers and more. Everywhere there are inscriptions and sculptures reflecting the artist’s preoccupations: the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, pre-Socratic philosophy, garden history, World War Two, the sea and fishing fleets, time and mortality. Ian Hamilton Finlay chooses now not to speak about his work in detail. Made to celebrate the artist’s 80th birthday in 2005, this film offers only a spare narration to complement a lushly visual showcase of the beauties, provocations and puzzles of Little Sparta.

Yinka Shonibare is a painter, photographer and installation artist, whose art is influenced by both the cultures of Nigeria, where he grew up, and Britain, where he studied and now lives. He has exhibited widely all over the world, and this film profile includes exhibitions filmed in London, Rotterdam and Stockholm. His paintings and his sculptural installations make extensive use of dyed fabrics, which became popular in West Africa after independence. But many of these textiles betray Indonesian influences, are manufactured in Holland and are purchased by the artist in Brixton in south London. The complexities of nationality and identity, of history and ethnicity, post-colonialism and today’s global economy, form the intellectual and aesthetic arena in which Shonibare works His works have a strongly contemporary feel, but at the same time they engage with the traditions and masterworks of western art history. The results are witty and playful, sensuous and poetic.

Vong Phaophanit showed his strikingly seductive Neon Rice Field when he was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1993. Like much of his rich and complex work since then, this installation exhibits a strong interest in language and light, in the painterly qualities of ephemeral materials and in ideas of cultural displacement. He was born in Laos, educated in France and has worked mostly in Britain since the early 1990s. Much of his work now is commissioned for architectural and environmental settings, including Outhouse in Liverpool. Created like many of his large-scale sculptures with fellow artist Claire Oboussier, this is a transparent glass house (with opaque windows) which serves as a flexible social space for the people who live in the surrounding tower blocks. In this profile, the artist reflects on his public work and his more private “studio” art, including his engaging series of perforated objects. He also discusses his most recent project, Life Lines, produced with Claire Oboussier in 2006 for Southend-on-Sea. Using cutting-edge electronic technology, Life Lines is an interactive light sculpture that responds to movement, sound, air pressure, humidity, light and wind, to reflect its ever-changing coastal environment.

Ian Davenport’s 48 metre-long painting Poured Lines transforms the tunnel beneath a railway bridge in Southwark, close to Tate Modern. The painting’s numerous vitreous enamel panels were created in a German factory where they were baked at fearsomely high temperatures. This film follows the artist as he creates this remarkable public artwork. Like all of Ian Davenport’s work, Poured Lines rigorously explores the qualities and possibilities of paint but is at the same time a joyful and exuberant composition. It also responds to the city around it, enhancing the colours and movements of a busy road. Ian Davenport showed in the near-legendary “Freeze” exhibition, organised by Damien Hirst, in 1988 and he was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1991. But as his paintings have evolved over two decades, his central concerns of colour and abstraction, experiment and the everyday, have remained strikingly consistent. Poured Lines exemplifies the simple delight of his very best work.

Artists Dalziel + Scullion have worked together since 1993, based in the remote north east of Scotland. Using photography, video, sculpture, sound and installation, they have created a collection of work that is recognised for its distinctive vision and sensitivity to its context and the environment. They are well known for their site-specific works, which include important public commissions, such as Horn, the giant stainless steel sculpture sited on the M8 motorway, which intermittently broadcasts poetry, music and voices at passing cars. They reflect on how these works illustrate the contradiction between the strange hybrid of wilderness and the high-tech, man-made industrial installations found in the remote landscapes of Scotland. The point at which nature and culture intersect is a continuing theme throughout their work, despite a more recent shift in geographical focus. In this video profile, Dalziel + Scullion discuss their continuing fascination with timescales and how their work attempts to reflect on the vast gap that exists between the limits of human history and the incomprehensible span of geological processes and creation. Home, the artists’ first solo exhibition at The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh in 2001, comprises an important body of new work, set against the backdrop of the magnificent glacial landscapes of northern Scandinavia. Their art reflects on the primary themes of landscape, evolution, religion and time, and represents a rediscovery of landscape as a means of reflecting on fundamental ideas about the world we live in today.

Gereon Krebber’s proposal for a monumental and expensive aluminium object called Tin won the 2003 Jerwood Sculpture Prize. Shot over more than a year, this film follows the creation, casting and placing of the final sculpture. Sitting in the elegant country house garden at Ragley Hall, Tin suggests a kitchen container or a hamburger and yet is at the same time defiantly abstract. Krebber is a young sculptor from Germany who studied at the Royal College of Art and now works in London. The surprising range of his work, and the processes which create it, are revealed here as he talks engagingly about how to create “seriously flippant” objects. His art, made with diverse materials including balloons and Cling Film as well as traditional media, has a unique deadpan humour. Its effect, the artist hopes, is to make you ”smile and shiver at the same time”. theEYE: Gereon Krebber is an Illuminations production in association with the Jerwood Charitable Foundation.

Richard Wilson is an internationally renowned sculptor and installation artist who often works on an architectural scale. 20:50, his room-sized sea of reflective sump oil, is an overwhelming experience. More recent works like Jamming Gears, made for London’s Serpentine Gallery, and Over Easy, built into The Arc arts centre in Stockton-in-Tees, offer resonant and profound challenges to our sense of space and of the environment around us. By turns amusing and disturbing, Wilson’s creations are about upsetting our preconceptions of who we are and what kind of world we live in. In this profile, Wilson outlines the genesis and meanings of a selection of key works, including Slice of Reality, a 20-metre-high cross-section of 600-ton dredger set in the Thames riverbed near the Millennium Dome. Like this monument to Britain’s shipping industry, many of Wilson’s works are created for specific places, and he reflects here on this, on the importance of collaboration and on his spectacular performances throughout the 1980s with Paul Burwell and Anne Bean in the Bow Gamelan Ensemble.

Graham Gussin creates art in an almost bewildering variety of media: film, sound, installation, events, photography, text, painting and more. The key early work Savannah (1990) features a wooden plaque and a wall light, while the production of the ambitious film projection Remote Viewer (2002) involved a trip to Iceland and the services of someone with telepathic ability. Underpinning all of his subtle, witty, often disarmingly beautiful work is a number of consistent concerns and influences: landscape and the notion of the sublime, science fiction cinema and Romanticism, place and movement. Made alongside the most comprehensive exhibition of Graham Gussin’s work to date, at Birmingham’s Ikon Gallery in 2002, this video profile showcases many of the artist’s works, including films and projections such as Beyond the Infinite (1994) and Spill (2000) which plays so productively with time, space and perception.

Hamish Fulton describes himself as a “walking artist”. For more than thirty years he has undertaken demanding walks in many parts of the world, and drawn on his experiences to create distinctive artworks using text, graphics and photographs. He aims to “leave no trace” in the landscape, and he acknowledges that his art cannot represent the experience of a walk. “What I’m interested in,” he explains, “is presenting a sort of skeleton of something, and then the viewer fills in what’s missing, maybe from your own experience.” Although they exhibit a striking consistency in their concerns, Hamish Fulton’s artworks can exist as large-scale wall paintings and as modest publications, as graphics to compete with advertising hoardings and as online animations. They are informed both by spiritual ideas and by political questions prompted by our uses of the environment and by specific issues such as land rights. Made alongside Hamish Fulton’s large-scale 2002 exhibition at Tate Britain, this profile features both an extensive range of the artist’s work made since 1971 and an engaging interview in which he outlines his ideas.

Regularly using subjects which lie on the border of science and philosophy, Conrad Shawcross‘s structural and often mechanical sculptures question empirical, ontological and philosophical systems ubiquitous within our lives. While at first appearing rational and functional, his complex mechanised systems in the end deny all rational function and so the viewer is forced down philosophical and metaphysical avenues to deduce a ‘rasion d’etre’. From early works such as The Nervous System, 2002 – a monumental spinning machine that endlessly weaves a length of coloured rope into the form of a double helix, the shape of DNA – to his recent giant spiral work Continuum, 2004, the artist has attempted to visualize, among other things, the incomprehensible of human concerns, time.

Tony Hill‘s films present entirely new ways of looking at the world in which we live. His extraordinary sculptural films turn and transform, squeeze and stretch the landscape and constantly challenge how we see what’s around us. They are films about perception, time and space but they are also films about the body and memory and being alive. Above all, they are constantly surprising and delightful and, often, funny. Many of the films have been created with specifically built camera rigs, and a selection of these is demonstrated in this richly illustrated interview with the artist. Among the works that Tony Hill discusses are Downside Up (1984) with its constantly orbiting viewpoint; Water Work (1987), which was shot on and just below the surface of a swimming pool; the sensual film Laws of Nature (1997); and the artist’s idiosyncratic portrait of Darlington Hall Estate in Devon, Camera Obscura (2000).