The informal memorial to Anthony Paul O’Connell (1932 – 2018)

INTERVIEWER: So where did the idea of an informal memorial in the crypt of St Giles’ Church come from?
INTERVIEWEE: Well, before the show came up, I was working on a series of masks and sort of thinking about gay identities and queering the gay tribe uniforms. Once I’d visited the crypt, I realised that what I was working on wasn’t right for that space. I had some ideas around making some new ceramic masks for the space, but none of them really excited me. The best idea I had involved mixing up hand-made and ready-made ceramics and displaying them in a box, like something you might find at a flea market or a jumble sale.
I liked the connection of the church with the jumble sale and then extended this connection with the church into memorials to the dead.

INTERVIEWER: You call it an informal memorial. Explain a little more about what you mean by that?
INTERVIEWEE: Memorials in churches tend to be grand, either memorialising someone rich, or famous or those who have died doing courageous acts. I wanted to create something small and quiet and melancholy, about an ordinary person, who led an ordinary life, who was overlooked in life and who’s memorial could be overlooked. Someone, or a whole group of people, who just get forgotten.

INTERVIEWER: So why choose a cardboard box that could have been dropped off for a jumble sale?
INTERVIEWEE: I guess, in addition to the implications of showing the work specifically in a church crypt, I was also interested in how I could play with displaying the work in a non-tradition gallery space. In a white cube art gallery, the audience sort of assumes everything they see is artworks. In a church crypt, there are other objects around that are part of that space regardless of the show taking place. I wanted to create something that kind of hovered between those two things. Something that the audience could overlook, like the person being memorialised was overlooked in life.

INTERVIEWER: Can you give me more detail of how you attempted to balance the work between being seen and being missed?
INTERVIEWEE: The first thing was the box and the internal relationship of the items. I tried a couple of boxes to get the right balance between too organised and too cramped just right. Then there was the external relationship of the box to the crypt. Rupert and I discussed this for some time. I wanted the box to be situated away from the rest of the exhibited pieces, but not so remote it looked deliberately placed. I actually ended up adding another box below it on the shelf, and as the exhibition was about to begin, I found a bag of rubbish and decided to put that on the floor near the box. The shelf the box was on was also near other signs and a fire extinguisher, so it kind of became part of the furniture.
I also played with what went on the outside of the box. Originally it had the letter from the care home on the outside, but this felt false too, so I put it in the box and put the care home sticker on the front. Hopefully, it ended up looking like it had just been left where it was, but quite a lot of thought went into it.

INTERVIEWER: So, I presume there was no title or explanation next to your work?
INTERVIEWEE: No, deliberately not. However, there was a plan of the exhibition with all the works listed and numbered with their location, so it was on that. And I also made a giveaway leaflet, as I did want to highlight the work obliquely. Though the leaflet was quite cryptic, no pun intended. And kind of told the narrative in a concentrated way. The back named the work, Anthony Paul O’Connell (1932 – 2018) and listed the items in the box. The cover had an image of the snow globe which, I think, sets the work up as a love story that has faded with time. When you opened the leaflet, you saw the photos of Tony and Mario and the content of the letter from the care home, giving you some details about Tony and also his situation when he died. On the reverse was a picture of the matchstick house, which I hope gave the impression of a happy, safe home, but also raises more questions which are not answered.

INTERVIEWER: This was your first show. Weren’t you concerned that people might miss your work?
INTERVIEWEE: Not really. Perhaps that had something to do with my confidence in my work. My initial idea was to make the work much more conceptual. Originally, the items in the box would actually be for sale for 10p with the proceeds going to the church. The idea was more about the low financial value other people put on things that have a high sentimental value. But in discussion with Kiera Freia, she felt that the personal story was far more interesting than the conceptual idea. I agreed and began to think more about how to create the narrative of a person’s life through 15 to 20 items that they might have kept with them in a care home.

INTERVIEWER: So tell me more about Anthony Paul O’Connell? Who was he?
INTERVIEWEE: Well, the first thing to say is that he is totally fictious. A couple of people I talked to at the show assumed he was real. I’m pleased it was that effective, but feel a little strange to have fooled the audience. This is something I need to think about more in my future work. When I started on the work, I decided to use one item to start building the character and his story. I had an old, scratched copy of the West Side Story soundtrack at home, so I was happy to include this in the box. So, he would be called Tony and he would be married to a woman called Maria and they would be from different communities and meet at a dance. And when they saw the film in 1961, they would see it as the story of their lives, without the dying part, and that would form the basis of the inscription on the sleeve. Once again, when I talked this through with Kiera, she felt that there was a connection between this piece of work and my previous gay identities work and I should make Tony a gay man and explore further the loneliness of gay men in old age. Initially, I was resistant to this as I wanted Tony to be an everyman and I was worried that by making him gay, it moved the story away from him and into the social and political situation of gay men living through the 1950’s until now.

INTERVIEWER: What in particular worried you about this?
INTERVIEWER: I wasn’t sure how to not make the piece about the decriminalisation in 1967, AIDS and Civil Partnerships. But actually this helped me in developing Tony’s character. I made him a solitary character. If his family and society didn’t accept him, then he would turn his back on society. He would effectively exile himself. So I decided he would have a fairly solitary job and hobbies.

INTERVIEWER: And then how did you develop his character further?
INTERVIEWEE: Well, armed with the proposal and the brief outline of his character, I headed off to Deptford Flea Market, hoping that I would find items that could populate the box and add depth and clues to his life and personality. And I was very lucky. The first item I found was the figurine of the tailor with the cat and this instantly felt right. I then found the ceramic thimbles with the birds on them and these tied into his being a tailor, but also made one of his hobbies bird-watching. Next, I found the print of Faversham church. I come from north Kent, so knew he could have gone bird watching on the marshes near there and also made me think he could have holidayed near there in Margate or Broadstairs.

INTERVIEWER: What really brings Tony and Mario, his partner, to life in the box are the photographs. Where did they come from?
INTERVIEWEE: On another stall in Deptford. As I said, I was really lucky. There was a pile of photos, and the dapper chappy who became Tony was in a lot of them. Also, I knew I wanted Mario to be from a different community, so when I found the photo of the man who became Mario, it was elating, but slightly strange, as finally I knew what these two characters I had been imagining looked like. I also found the pile of slides of flowers, so with the really good photos of Tony and the flowers, it made sense for Mario to take photos as a hobby. I had also created a timeline of Tony’s life, so it was then just a case of finding more items that added to Tony’s story and that I could write inscriptions or messages on, to add more detail.

INTERVIEWER: This work seems a bit of a departure for you. Before this, you seem to have placed a lot of emphasis on making, but this work uses found items.
INTERVIEWEE: Yes, I think this was another challenge I wanted to tackle. I’ve always been a bit dubious of ready-mades. That was why I left it to the chance of what I found to add the detail to the story. I didn’t want to over think the piece and then struggle to find the materials, rather I wanted the materials to create the work. It became apparent to me quite quickly, that creating something from ready-made items involved the same process as making something from metal or wood. You have an idea and that idea suggests materials, but it’s only when you start constructing it, you find out what works and what doesn’t, and you react and adapt, and the finished piece might be quite different from your original idea. Also, similarly to the things I’ve made from raw materials, I felt it needed a lot of attention to detail, to be finely crafted, to make it convincing.

INTERVIEWER: There is one item you made in the box, the matchstick model of Prospect Cottage, Derek Jarman’s house in Dungeness. How did that come about?
INTERVIEWEE: Part of me, really wanted to put something of me in the box. And I wanted Tony to make something as a hobby. If I had found a ship in a bottle or something, I probably would have used that, but I didn’t so I decided to make something out of matchsticks, as I felt this was a hobby he could still do in the care home.
Around the time I started working on this, we were asked to do a writing exercise based on “I remember” and a word we were given at random. My word was Uranium…. Which made me think of the nuclear power station at Dungeness and the time, around 1992 probably, when I visited Dungeness with a friend and saw, from a distance, Derek Jarman working in his garden. It dredged up loads of memories and so I watched the Isaac Julian documentary about him. It struck me that the character I had created in Tony was almost the complete opposite, I could even say Tony was the negative image of Derek Jarman. Tony turns his back on society as a whole, has no interaction with the gay community and is completely oblivious to the political issues of the time. Whereas, Derek Jarman lived his life in public as a gay man and was open about his HIV status and heavily involved in the politics.
This also linked into the whole idea of “Inheritance” for gay men, something that has been on my mind since I saw “The Inheritance” by Matthew Lopez at The Young Vic earlier this year. Although Derek Jarman says he would be happy for his work to have disappeared when he died, I’m not sure this is true and his legacy is immense. So even though most gay men will have no progeny, for an artist like Derek Jarman, their influence, their work, their whole existence lives on. For someone like Tony, who hides himself away and turns inwards and dies alone, there is no inherence, there is nothing bequeathed. That is really what my informal memorial is about.
So the matchstick model is a bit of me, but a bit of everything that Tony wasn’t in the box. I’d like to think that perhaps Tony and Mario took a bird watching trip to Dungeness. Mario would have been sceptical about finding any flowers to photograph. Walking along the shingle they saw Prospect Cottage and the garden. I’m not sure what Mario would have thought of it, probably that it would have looked better without all the bits of junk in it, but the image of the isolated black cottage with the yellow windows would have stayed with them both and they would have imagined it as somewhere they could get away from the world. Once again, at total odds with the reality of Derek Jarman’s house.

INTERVIEWER: Do you feel you have completed Tony’s story?
INTERVIEWEE: No. I have become quite attached to and fond of Tony as a character and his last belongings. I now want to explore different ways of telling his story or narrative through the objects and the inscriptions and messages in them.

INTERVIEWER: What are you planning?
INTERVIEWEE: I would like the jumble box to be the first of three pieces that can viewed together as one work.
The second piece, once again inspired by the Jarman documentary is a formal archive box. Famous artists live on through their work and the other items that get left behind, minutely catalogued and pored over by academics to give insight into the artist’s work. I would like to do the same to catalogue Tony through his final, treasured possessions.
The third piece, will be a film. Taking the archive as a starting point, I want to build up a full life story for Tony, embellishing the details from the scant evidence we have, like an archaeologist. I think I will use the flower slides and images from the flower book and bird book in the box, to create a visual backdrop from Tony’s imagination with a voice over, documentary style, telling us a fictionalised version of Tony’s fictional life.

The archive box of Anthony Paul O’Connell’s last possessions

INTERVIEWER: So how do you feel about the formal archive box, now it is finished?
INTERVIEWEE: It was actually a really difficult piece to work on, and I’m still not sure I’ve got my head around what it is I’ve made and how it functions. As a companion piece to the informal memorial jumble sale box it had a logic to it. I
wanted to explore how I could unpack the jumble sale box and tell the narrative of Tony in a different way, but still present it in a cardboard box. I also wanted to play with the idea of informal and formal.

INTERVIEWER: So, do you think the archive box successful?

INTERVIEWEE: I’m not even sure what criteria I would use to measure success. But I think I will only know when I come to exhibit the informal memorial, the formal archive and the audio/visual piece together.

INTERVIEWER: Do you see them as three pieces that form one work then?
INTERVIEWEE: I think so. But as I said before, until the audio/visual piece is completed and I put them all together, I don’t think I will really know. I feel like the audio/visual piece and the informal memorial are the key elements and the archive box is kind of the glue that holds them together. Without it, I feel like it might be too much of a jump from the box to the film, that the clues need unpacking into the archive before I can expand them from fact to fiction in the film. But I’m not sure if that’s just for me and not something an audience will need or even understand.

INTERVIEWER: You talk about fact and fiction, but I thought Tony was a totally fictitious character?
INTERVIEWEE: Yes, he is. When I created him, I created a whole back story with a timeline and really thought about his character, his relationship with Mario and his mother and how he viewed the rest of society. I then put clues to these in the jumble sale box. The items, the inscriptions, the postcards, all hint at events in his life or aspects of his personality, but these clues are fairly well hidden and after showing it in the crypt, I’m pretty sure no one would take the time to look for them all and start to create their own narrative. That was why I created the archive box, to pull these clues out and present them as facts.

INTERVIEWER: Then as the artist or as a viewer, you can then take these facts and start to create a more detailed, but speculative narrative from them?
INTERVIEWEE: Exactly. I guess it’s a bit like archaeology. You take a skull and reconstruct the face. You take the possessions and artefacts you find and create a story around them. But it is full of assumptions and based on your own understanding of the world. That story will be partly your own story. So, the film will be my speculative or fictious voice of Tony. I think it will bring him to life, literally give him a voice, but it isn’t the definitive story. Everybody can create their own Tony from the evidence. Even though I created him, I’m happy for other people to view him differently to me.

INTERVIEWER: Returning to the archive box, how do you think the audience will react to this work as part of the trilogy?
INTERVIEWEE: I think this is still my major concern. The jumble sale box was made specifically for the show in the crypt, but I felt after the show that I could use Tony to explore more ideas. But putting the informal memorial in a gallery space completely changes how it is viewed. There will be no confusion around it being an artwork. So, I felt it needed other pieces to describe it. The archive box was supposed to do that, but I fear I have created another piece that the viewer will not realise they can look through, like the jumble sale box, or will just get bored with after a few sheets and so the facts will still remain unseen. In fact, the whole process of creating the archive box was interesting in this respect. It was actually quite tedious to produce and so it is difficult for me to judge how it will be received, or if the audience will be like, “yeah I’ve got this now”, after a couple of sheets. But it did make me think about the whole process of documenting and archiving a famous person’s artefacts. How any object they owned or used becomes invested with extra significance. How academics then use these archives to form an insight into the famous person’s life or work and I guess, just the point and validity of the whole activity.