Jeremy Dickinson

relate back to childhood experiences

This is the first exhibition with you here at new space in Kiyosumi. Did you have this gallery space in mind when you were painting?

Not for this particular show because I knew that the space is quite large but I had not seen it in person. During the installation, I was happy to play with the space and see how the different groups of works would go together.

This exhibition consists mainly of the stacking series and map series. Could you tell us about these two bodies of works?

The stack paintings are an ongoing series of works which document my collection of toy cars. And the arrangements usually relate back to childhood experiences of organising the vehicles. For example, in 'Performance Transporter', the stack of cars is arranged in a spectrum, starting with yellow at the bottom, then orange, red, purple, blue, green and finishes with a green truck on the top. It is transporting a wind-up clockwork toy whale. You are supposed to put a ping-pong ball on the top, which will float on air when the whale is wound up. The truck is actually an army tank transporter, but this time is carrying the performing whale and it's superballs.

How about “Blue Jumpers”?

'Blue Jumpers' has a slightly different kind of spectrum, beginning with yellow at the top, then red, orange and yellow again. The group of blues on top are small 'Matchbox' cars jumping from the stack using the grain elevator. I think the smaller toy cars look like the toy's toys. I odten include dual scales to animate the paintings.

Do you stack cars like this at your studio?

Not at this height because it would be impossible to install. However, all the connections do make sense and I set them up in the studio. I would begin by stacking three or four cars, then take the bottom one away, and add another to the top, and then repeat the process.

Do you take photos?

No, these are from life. I set them up, light them, and then paint directly from the objects.

Could you tell us about the size of the mini cars in your works? They look like life-size.

Generally, the painted cars are usually around one and a half times bigger than the actual toys.

Could you tell us about the map series?

Well, these coloured blocks originated as children's building blocks which kids use to build structures with. In the paintings, they support the vehicles in a kind of space that is different from the stack paintings. The 'Double Omnibus Wall Map' painting is in fact a map of the north of England, defined by the colours of the buses of each town or city, with another map of London (with contemporary red double deckers) overlaid on the first map. The left side is the west coast of England, and on the right, the east coast. They are three dimensional maps and could in theory be constructed using the blocks and toy vehicles.

How do you decide the composition?

The starting point is to establish the structure of the map by locating where the towns are. I know where the buses are going to go and then it is a case of playing around with the blocks and building the support structure for the buses.

And that is similar in “Football League Wall Map of England and Wales” as well?

Yes, this is the whole map of England, and you can vaguely work out the shape of the country. The toy buses in this painting are much smaller in scale ('Matchbox' buses), about 5cm each. In this map, all the towns represented have lower league, less successful, football teams.

You must like football very much.

Well, I like using the statistics of football to provide information for the selection of vehicles. So the paintings are not just about football, they are also about the liveries of the buses in the towns selected. I use football statistics to choose which vehicles I will include.

Do football teams use those buses to travel?

No, the colours of the buses are not related to the colours the teams play in. For example, London has a number of lower league teams, playing in different colours, but I included one larger scale bus in red (the colour of buses across London) to represent these teams. There is also an element of nostalgia here as well, as I have used pre-corporate municipal liveries, found in the towns represented around the 1960s and 1970s.

From when did you start this map series?

They started off as small still life paintings of building blocks, a collection spanning 3 generations which I have in the studio. They are my dad's, mine, and also those belonging to my kids. As the series has developed, they have become more like generic blocks, and simplified.

So that’s when the whole series began to develop?

Yes. Another map in the exhibition is 'Fishbowl Wall Map (Milwaukee to Boston)'. This is a map of the eastern USA. It covers the area from Milwaukee to Chicago, to Cleveland, Buffalo, Washington DC, New York, Boston and Manchester (New Hampshire). The bus is the classic American GM bus from the 1960s and 70s, now pretty much extinct. It was known as the 'Fishbowl' due to the shape of the windshield.

How about “International Bus Park”? This work reminds me of some land art sculptures.

I was thinking of Richard Long's sculptures as I used to assist him installing his work. This painting adopts the rules he uses for one of his slate sculptures. The toy buses all look outwards from an imaginary circle.