Alex Seton:

Things you argue about over dinner

In 2006, I was invited to participate in a large sculpture competition at Phillips Dark Hotel. It was a fancy old mansion in regional Australia and 20 invited artists. And, you know, you’re invited to do your biggest, boldest statement. And we had this really interesting history of the itinerant worker or the swagman, such as the famous song Waltzing Matilda, who would go from farm to farm in regional Australia. And they were co opting out of society, then participating only when and where they wanted.

The idea that that is not possible anymore was something of interest to me, and so I created a man in a swag, but unidentified, beanie pulled over the right down at the head and scrunched up, but did it in Australian marble. And they just put it out on the lawn as if he was just sleeping on a lawn in front of this mansion. And it was very interesting because at the of the awards, the concierge came out

and said, oh, excuse me, you’re the young man who did the sculpture of

the guy in the sleeping bag?

And I said, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That’s me. He said, oh,

it’s very interesting. We have it’s a real litmus test of the kind of guests that we have here at this five star hotel. The one that comes out

and says, oh, what do

you do about the poor man sleeping on the lawn? And then the other one that says, what do you do about the poor man sleeping on the lawn?

Hi, this is Sarah with another episode of Materially Speaking, where artists and artisans tell their stories through the materials they choose. Sometimes in Pietro Santa you have to literally run to catch an artist as they’re rushing to finish a commission, perfect a patina or create a piece of work before shipping it. My meeting with Alex Seaton was one of these occasions. We had already met at the Crocci Verdi where many of the sculptors take their working lunch, But by the time I rang him, he had merely one day more before returning to Australia. So I shot over to the studios of Massimo Goleni, which is Alex’s home from home, to chat with him.

Brought up in an unconventional family, Alex came to love carving marble at a very early age. With a keen interest in the world, his art addresses social topics that move him and make us think about them too. I settled down to talk with him and asked him to introduce himself.

My name is Alex Seaton. I’m an artist from Sydney, Australia. So we’re standing in the old studios of Massimo Goleni. They’re a bunch of artisans that produce work for artists and for public commissions and things like that. I’ve been working closely with them since 2010.

Tell me where you’re from and a little bit about your childhood background when you became an artist.

I grew up in Sydney, Australia, but I grew up remote to Sydney. It’s a more rural regional Australia, about four or five hours out of Sydney. And it was off grid, but it was near a place called Bombyon Caves that had this beautiful marble quarry, a marble quarry that stayed open for a hundred years and was closing in around 2002. And it is a hundred year lease, and it was responsible for a lot of the decorative marble and works that happened in and around the building and construction of Sydney during the twentieth century. And it was run by two Italian boys, the the Molocca brothers.

It was an extraordinary place, and I started carving marble with my father’s wood chisels when I was about eight. He said, I’ll give you some stone chisels instead for your birthday.

Did he work in wood then?

No. No. No. My my parents were interesting characters. They’re both in the IT information technology arena.

And they made their money and then took their kids off to the bush. No electricity, sawdust toilet, no hot water, that sort of thing. And we were raised there, and it was a place of adventure. And it means I don’t think I would be an artist now if I didn’t have that time to play. So I found the clay in the creek and the the marble in the nearby quarry was just part of the materials I was playing with as part of the bush.

I have a very different relationship with marble because I knew it as a pliable sculpting material, something really plastic, as in pliable and easy to use.

Wow. And what sort of thing were you carving when you were eight and upwards?

Oh, gosh. I think I my first attempt was to reproduce my teddy bear. Genuinely, I think that’s what I tried to do. And then, yeah, as soon as I became a horny teenager, you can imagine, when my interest in suddenly in the Renaissance sculpture and the Baroque kicked in. And

how many children were you?

One of four boys. All creative people now.

So other sculptors? Or No. No. No. We have

an actor, designer, and basically a philosopher. We were lucky enough to be given scholarships as boys to the Jesuit prestigious high school in Sydney, and so we went there as teenagers. And then I went to College of Fine Arts in Sydney. It was sort of to do art theory and history to catch up on this sort of history of contemporary art that I just knew there was these huge gaps in the history books that I’d known. They all ended in the nineteen fifties and sixties with Jackson Pollock, and that was it.

How was your education before you went as a teenager?

At a local Catholic high school, but it was 20 children of which three of whom were my brothers. So I was making a lot of bad performance art and a lot of sound recordings, none of which really I let see the light of day anymore. But it evolved into an obsession with artists like Liam Gillick, English artist who was very much aware of the artist as performer, performative, and or instructions to the audience as game and the connection between audience, artist, and the artwork. And sculpture was this sort of proxy for the ideas. They sort of put it out there.

The artist no longer has to be the performer. The object is. And Liam Gillick used to write about things like games. The art work is the game between audience and artist. That informed us sort of early level playfulness in the idea

of sculpture.

I started making, you know, garbage bags in black marble in the same way that a lot of English artists in that era were doing, like, bronze garbage bags and things like that. You know, it’s kind of a rejection of all of it. But it was all in the spirit of play and games and maybe being a little too clever, I think. I found my way back to well, actually, this would be beautiful, quite interesting in marble. So my first shows were things like the gallery benches all being replacing the leather tops with marble versions of that, which had bump prints in it and things like that.

So it’s very subtle. You come into an empty gallery, you’re like, what am I looking at? It’s about the sensual discovery as well. And then I fell in love with that material sensuality and realized, oh, yeah. That’s right.

I have this facility, this thing I used to do as a kid. Right? It’s a carved stone. And so I started it again in gusto, this time much more informed by its full history, This idea of this empire and the remove of empire and colonial Australia to be doing that means a very particular thing. To use marble from Australia is to mean extractions from the land, and that land is land that was never ceded to the indigenous population of Australia.

So I try to make sure to acknowledge that this is what traditional lands each individual stone Australian stone that I use is from because there’s over 500 different indigenous tribes. And it’s about that time I’m I’m influenced by artists like Guojian, a Chinese dissident artist who came out to Australia after Tiananmen, one of the first of the students in the protest. And he says, hey. I see that you’re quite political. All this stuff you argue about over the dinner table, why don’t you put it in the work?

And he was right. He’s like, yeah. I I do have that language. And one of the things about socially engaged work is that it’s not easily swept aside as it might be if you made it in paper or or even in Canvas. A marble statement is a statement.

You know it’s deliberate. You know? A 24 ton artwork is a 24 ton artwork. It can’t be ignored. It has a physical presence.

And I think in that labor, there is at least an assumed sincerity talking about things like post nine eleven politics in a world of where where we were giving away our privacy for the sake of security. Of course, now we live in a very different world where we’re giving away our privacy to many different companies in the name of convenience. I put that stuff in the work gently about where does the individual sequester themselves away from the society. Is there a place that is that possible anymore? Childhood that I enjoy, does that exist anymore for anyone?

And I don’t think it does, to be honest. In 2006, I was invited to participate in a large sculpture competition, the Philip Stark Hotel. It was a fancy old mansion in regional Australia and 20 invited artists. And, you know, you’re invited to do your biggest, boldest statement. There was talk at the time of identity cards as one sort of thing that was very much conceived as not Australian or not part of the national character, and suddenly there was these big political demands for it.

And we had this really interesting history of the itinerant worker or the swagman, such as in the famous song Waltzing Matilda, who would go from farm to farm in regional Australia. And they were co opting out of society and then participating only when and where they wanted. The idea that that is not possible anymore was something of interest to me. And so I created a man in a swag, but unidentified, beanie pulled over the right down at the head and scrunched up. But he did it in Australian marble, he and just put it out on the lawn as if he was just sleeping on a lawn in front of this mansion.

And it was very interesting because at presentation of the awards, the concierge came out and said,

oh, excuse me. You’re the young man who did the sculpture

of the guy in the sleeping bag.

And I said, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That’s me.

He said, oh, it’s very interesting. We have it’s a real litmus test of the kind of guests that we have here at this five star hotel. The one that comes out

and says, oh, what do

you do about the poor man sleeping on the lawn? And then the other one that says, what are you gonna do about the poor man sleeping on the lawn? I think the work that I got well known for was in 2012, which presented at Hong Kong Art Fair just before it became Art Basel. I was doing these hooded figures with hollowed out faces cross legged. And there’s a few other artists who work with sort of a a shrouded empty void.

I wasn’t aware of it at time, but, you know, many ideas come at the same time to different artists across the world. For me, and this was pointed because it was about that moment in time. 2012, there’s the Million Hoodie March. There’s a Trayvon Martin shooting. That boy was wearing a hoodie.

At the same time, Marcus Zuckerberg is launching Facebook on the stock exchange wearing a hoodie. It’s a egalitarian garment of the moment, so quite often I get obsessed with things like fashion items. And so in this case, I’ve made a cross legged human, not even identified male or female. And it could be benevolent or could be malevolent. There’s riots in London months before I present it, and I recognize that everyone that came and saw the exhibition who was coming from The UK saw it as malevolent immediately because of the recent history.

Interestingly enough, one bronze cast of the work went to a place in Lake Macquarie in North Coast, New South Wales in Australia, and they purchased the work because the hoodie had been banned there in the early nineties. It was seen as a way of getting around security cameras and hiding your identity. And, of course, that’s partially why I made the work. It’s the idea of being watched all the time. I was very much a kind of mid two thousands, 2000 all the way to 2010 concern.

The rise of the surveillance camera everywhere. I think it’s around about that same time that Ai Wei Wei has the same idea as me and makes marble security cameras. The surveillance state is on the rise.

I love the titles of the work that I’ve seen of yours.

My question is, do the titles come first,

or do they come afterwards? What I’m thinking of is somebody died trying to get a life like mine.

A great question, only because I’m standing in front of works that I have multiple titles for and I have not yet titled. And sometimes it comes really easy, as in the idea is distilled into just a certain set of words. I often write first before I draw, and then I then I carve directly into marble. I don’t really like to work with clay or plaster. It doesn’t interest me.

I’m just as quick in marble. And the words usually inform it. In this case, the title’s not quite right. It needs something else. So it’s either comes to me at the very beginning or very, very last thing.

Nothing in between. As somebody died trying to have a life like mine, I was trying to title that work, and I was describing it to Nick Mitsevich, the director of the National Gallery of Australia, but then the director of the Art Gallery of South Australia for his two thousand and fourteen Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, and it was commissioned for that. And he said, oh, I said, what’s your title? And I I had

been talking about through the work, and I said, well, you know, it’s sort of

this motivation of somebody dying trying to have a life like it was literally just me describing the work. I went, oh, that’s it. Like, as soon as the words came out of my mouth as I was describing the work to him and why I was gonna do it, I said, oh, that’s the title as well.

What are the other pieces you’d like to

talk about that mean something to you?

What’s really interesting there is the works that that fail. More recently, I’ve done a set of work that I like, but I think it was my COVID work. It was my trapped in a much smaller spaces, you could feel that. It’s quite literally that. It’s taking advantage of the idea of the block as body, as a proxy for the body, and I had small elements of the limbs sticking out.

And some were really successful and some are awful, like just twee and silly and awful. Not everything should be shown, but we live in a world where, you know, you’re posting online, you’re excited, and then you’ve a bit of circumspect about a work, you’re like, no, I really like that bodywork. Doesn’t quite achieve the aims that I think it was gonna

I like one which might be from that series, which is feet coming out of the bottom, a memorial.

That particular work I really love. What you’re referring to there is a block of Australian stone. People of early colonial Sydney were stealing oyster shells off the rocks, and there were food for the local indigenous population of Manly and things. The government the early colonial Australia recognizes that it’s a food source and restricts it. It’s one of the first environmental laws.

£5, which is a lot of money at that time. It’s like three or four years’ wages, would be fine to anyone that who’s caught stealing oysters from the the shells of Sydney Harbour. And this is, like, 1810. First environmental law, really. Hey.

Stop doing that. But in order to replace that clear need, because they were constructing and constructing, the governor sends engineers north, west, and south to go looking for any form of lime. And so in one of these old quarries in a place called Bathurst, convicts used to hack away and pull out these big blocks. And so there’s a very particular kind of old fashioned sparrow pecking way of digging them out. And I found one of these old sheared roughened blocks that looks kind of tortured.

And and in it, I put a penitent figure, just a pair of feet as if kneeling, sticking out from one face of the block, clean-cut. And, of course, you’ve seen the block. It’s creamy. It’s not necessarily fleshy, but it’s it’s sort of certainly creamy and and bodily. It’s got a warmth to it, but it’s also got a very tortured and scarred surface.

So there’s a lot of pain there. And in that penitence, I was thinking about things at the time, like monuments around the world being pulled down of slavers and colonialists who with a terrible past. And, you know, what do we replace them with? Something more humble, and I I called it proposal for a humble monument.

Let’s talk about the body of work that you’re finishing off. So you’ve come to Pietro Santa for seven weeks to work on a series.

This is the new body of work here, and that’ll be presented London Freeze in October and in my gallery, Sullivan’s Trumph in Singapore. And Sullivan’s Trump represent me in Australia as well. To be able to work at scale with the teams here, I’ve been coming here since 2003 as a student. I’ve been working in Musa Mulguleni studios since 2010. Pizzasanza is such a special place.

The sensibility here because they’re some of the best sculptors. I love being alongside that. Also, I think they choose some of the best stone around. We can get into the idea that Pizzasanza is this enormously practical place. This industry is well grained, and there’s a rich history and tradition here.

But also forget that it actually used to participate in a much, much wider world. And so I just love coming here, and there will continue to come here. From a very early age, I think I saw a 1975 National Geographic about the carving going on in Pietro Santa. I saw an article from I think it was June 1975 about this place. I’ve been obsessed with coming here and, like, just curious to come here and then fell in love with it when I came as a young student, you know, just after art school.

I think Peter Santa takes itself for granted just how much it does and how many artists come and go over the years to participate in this extraordinary place. It’s a place of discussion because of the nature of the piazza, I think. Artists from around the world come in many different forms. I’ve met most of the world’s best contemporary artists at some point having a vermentino at Bio Michelangelo.

So thanks to Alex Seton. You can find out more about him on his website, alexseton.com, or on Instagram, alex seaton underscore. As always, there are photographs of the works we’ve discussed on our website, materiallyspeaking.com, and on Instagram at materially speaking podcast. If you enjoy materially speaking, please join our community. Sign up to our email newsletter, which you can find on our website, and then we can let you know about new episodes and our special events.

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