SIMON LININGTON
What items did you choose?
The items I chose are these souvenirs, which are glass vials or bottles filled with colourful sands from Allen Bay on the Isle of Wight. The Isle of Wight is where I grew up, and Allen Bay is famous for having the most variety of colourful sand in the United Kingdom, of which there are 28 different colours. These souvenirs were invented by my great-great-grandfather in the Victorian period, and it was my family's business to make and sell them in shops in the major towns on the Isle of Wight. My mother used to fill them at the kitchen table when she was a child after school, so they're quite an important item or object in my family history.
What meaning do they carry?
I suppose I feel it more now that I'm older and now I don't live on the Isle of Wight and haven't lived on the Isle of Wight for a long time. I guess it is my identity, really; it's where I've come from. It's my kind of personal history and the history and the story of the place that I've come from is very much entwined in those objects.
What does home mean to you?
That's a good question. I think as I travel more for work, my idea of what a home is has changed. I used to think of it very much as this place, this house or building, this is home, but I feel like it’s more something you carry inside you. Maybe it's a feeling that home gives you, but for me it's sort of that idea of standing and looking at the water, the sea, and kind of seeing the horizon line and how that feels. I think that kind of space is quite a big part of my identity, really. A lot of people that I grew up with and I would say there's something different about people who grew up on an island, but we couldn't quite identify what we think it is… I had this chat actually with a friend who grew up in Malta and he said the same. We both agreed that we didn't really know what it was, but we think it's being surrounded by the sea, and that's something that he and I have in common: being able to see the sea and hear the sea all the time. If I think about that, then I feel like I'm home…and it's interesting because people sometimes refer to being from an island when they talk about being from the UK, but [it’s not quite the same].
You can nearly always hear the sea. I could hear the sea from my parents' house. You can't see it; it’s like a 10-minute walk but on some days you can hear it or you can hear boats on the water. If it's really rough you can hear it, and that's quite amazing. But we used to live a bit nearer to the sea, yeah, you don't have to walk very far, then you can even smell it some days. So yeah, I mean it's not quite the same if we're in London, the sea feels like a really long way away. The whole pace is different, incredibly different in how you kind of spend your day in a city. It moves really fast and yet everything takes a long time to do where [in the Isle of Wight] it's not the same, you feel like more in charge of your day, like ‘the master of your day’.
What does home mean in terms of roots or people that came before you?
It’s hard to talk about meaning, but I do have quite an interesting story in that I discovered that my family, they actually arrived on the island from what we call the mainland - so it'd be the UK, in the summer in 1776. It is well known because there was one day a year that they used to be where the tide would be out so far, that people could walk across the Solent, which is the water between the Isle of Wight and the rest of England. A lot of people would wait for this day in the year and then they'd walk across the sea because they didn't have to pay for a boat. They would usually go there and do things like pick crops and do farm labour work, so it would usually be people from a lower-income kind of background, and that's how my family first came to the Isle of Wight, I think it was from Dorset, which would've been a long walk. They actually settled in a town - it wasn't a town then, it was a tiny village - called Chale, and the elder man of the family built the house there, which is still there today, and it was the house that my grandfather was born in. I quite liked that story about how they arrived there because it's kind of mad, isn't it? That the sea would just be so low you'd just walk. It was just like a cheap way for people to get there. They didn't have any money really.
How does the role of home influence your work?
It has a massive, massive influence. A lot of the largest sculptures, which are made for outside, are all site-specific, so they use material which is collected in the landscape that they stand in. The reason I do that is because just like the souvenirs are a representation of the Isle of Wight and are made with the material from the place, I try to keep that idea quite consistent from the original souvenir to my larger sculptures. I think that's quite important because I could make quite a similar sculpture in Spain, Mexico, Netherlands, wherever and they would always look different because the material is from a different place, so in that way, the sculpture's identity is related to its environment in the way that I would say that I am. It's really important. When you have a public project, I think it's really important that the sculpture links to the environment: if I turned up and just filled it with blue, it might look nice, but why? I think it's really important that it responds to its place, just for the people that are viewing it: why is this here? Why has he made it like this?
How did this come up in your work and how do you see this continue in the future?
I actually made the first tube in 2014, and then I didn't make anything similar to that for four years. At the time I think I didn't quite see it, but I had a show and that tube was in it. I remember it was actually Rakib who said to me “You know what? To me there's something here. I'm not quite sure what it is, but I think you've got something there”. I kind of thought about it but was like “What does he mean? What is it?”. I didn't really know what it was. Looking back, he was right, because now the biggest one has been six metres and there will be others. I think I had to be older and more removed from my culture and where I come from to really see how closely my identity was a part of it: sort of like the further you get from home, the more you feel what it feels like. As you get older you kind of think more about where you've come from and maybe what you are missing sometimes as well.