The World of James Green Artist James Green’s output is as prodigious as it is prolific. As his solo show Rhondda World came to a close at Cardiff M.A.D.E., Sam Perry dived into a strange world of masks and Top Trumps and the rituals of daily life In dim, ambient light, James Green is sitting alone, hunkered on a three-legged stool, too low for the adjacent table, so he uses his hardback copy of Will Self’s Shark as a work surface. Surrounding him are piles up to his knee of 8 x 11cm cards. Some piles have collapsed and have spread the cards around the rug. The latest of these cards is pressed and held still against the book. There are many tools made for these hands. On the table an assortment of Pritt Sticks line up like Russian dolls in ascending order beside a cluster of scissors; some are the fingernail kind and some the orangehandled kitchen kind. More than sixty coloured felt-tip pens create a psychedelic piano keyboard along the table. The ultramarine one is gripped deftly in his hand. As concentrated as he possibly can be, he is sporadically being interrupted by my calls and emails.
Sam Perry: Let’s begin at the beginning, by which I mean the beginning of the latest incarnation of your work, as you have said yourself, you’ve been making art since childhood. Put in literary terms, it appears to me that A Day in the Life of..., your decade-long, daily creation of small works
on card, provides a kind of preface, a backstory, informing the narrative of the recent developments in your work. These work particularly well in the montage format of your exhibition. On the gallery walls, the sheer collective scale of these small works is blinding and confusing, yet also joyous. If necessity is the mother of invention, from what you’ve told me, the necessity in this instance is ‘looking busy’. We’ve all been in
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situations where we try to look busy whilst gathering our thoughts and adjusting to new situations. Tell us about that process. James Green: The idea for A Day in the Life of… took longer to form than I originally thought. While studying for my Masters at the Royal Collage of Art, I got totally stuck and was only making artwork to look busy in front of my tutors and peers. My work had lost any real meaning to me, soon after I started there. During the Easter break of that period, I returned to visit my parents and found a box of Top Trumps I had made as an 11 yearold kid. Looking through them, with bits of yellowed Sellotape hanging from them and terrible spelling, I realised that I had made them without the worry of whether they were ‘Art’ or not. I remembered making these cards, I worked hard on them, and took nearly a week to think up 26 different characters, each with their specific Strength, Skill, Brains and Fear Factor. It dawned on me that I had become too concerned with what my work was supposed to be doing theoretically (which was not a lot at the time), and that I had started to lose the sheer joy of drawing, which I had had without realising it as a kid. Back then, I would often just sit around all day drawing and making things purely because I loved doing it, without thinking about what it meant or where it stood within historic and contemporary art. I went back to London with the conviction to drop the theory I was trying to squash into my art; to make small drawings every day, and to wait to see if anything came of it. Ten years later I have made somewhere in the region of 5,000 of these small works, which come together as one piece in A Day in The Life of…, and it was the memory of making artwork as a child, without a proper understanding of art, that started me on this path.