Heather and Ivan Morison

'You should plant your bulbs in autumn when the wind is...'
Morfa Mawddach, Wales, 27 February 2006

Over the last five years Heather & Ivan Morison have been producing an evolving set of artworks documenting and fictionalising their real life adventures across Birmingham, Russia, China, New Zealand and beyond, travelling by foot, planes, boats and science fiction. Fuelling much of their work is a garden in Birmingham which they cultivated and nurtured as both their research and their art in pursuit of examining and complicating mans relationship to and will to order, classify and consume nature. Recently they have moved to the West Coast of Wales and acquired a wood of six acres set on a dramatic and rugged rise set amongst working farms and small communities. Prior to the interview they took me on a tour around the wood introducing me to an arboretum of trees and ideas at present hidden and untapped within the thick of the land but ripe for harvesting over the next fifty years.

'Colours and sounds in Ivan Morison's garden', 2002 DVD installation (still from film)

GW: So what's the garden then or what was the garden?

IM: Well it's a garden still. We will carry on producing cards from the garden. For so long the garden has existed for people in their imaginations just through the cards and I think we should carry on working with that, the fact is it still exists in some way. And it works, it seems to work.

GW: Are all the cards based on real things that have happened in the garden?

IM: They never were even when we had the garden.

HM: They were never like fantasy, we just make things more magical and they were all based on experiences, even the ones that don't come from the garden. Within all our work some of the work is very truthful and some of the work is less truthful, but not less real, let's put it that way.

IM: It's quite interesting; I think sometimes some of the things we might make up then lead us to actually do that thing.

HM: Yes.

IM: There's a very simple card that we did quite early on, it's just about birds we'd spotted in the garden, just a list. I didn't know anything about spotting birds, so I just made them up, I didn't spend any time spotting birds. But now, if I was to do a card about that, four or five years on because I've travelled so far with this, I would make absolutely dead sure I'd spotted every single bird and identified it. But that was the starting point for us to then go on and do a whole load of other work about birds and bird spotting, bird calls, bird recordings. So although it was made up then, it would be real now and its sort of kicked us off in a way.

GW: So when was there a conscious point when you said that the garden was going to be the work and a prompt for other works?

IM: We got the garden for another reason to house this scaled model of Derek Jarman's Prospect Cottage in Dungeness. Obviously it doesn't look exactly like it but it's built on the same principles, you know, a corrugated roof, black tar paint, yellow woodwork, wood panelled inside. At the time I was building clay recreations of dead American stars and I built the Lost Tribe of the Andamanese, a lost tribe from the Great Andaman Islands. I saw an article on them in an old copy of National Geographic. Anyway, I started building these things inside the cottage and then it started to flip around and I needed somewhere then for them to then sit outside the cottage and I decided to make a cottage, somewhere for them with a garden around it, with these figures like plants in the garden.

We ended up getting an allotment and put the cottage there, but I never really then carried on with that because we'd found this amazing place. It's not just an allotment, it was this old leisure garden and it had so much history to it. So much had happened there. It had been empty for eight years, before that three sisters had run it and they had taken it over from their father. The last of the sisters had died eight years before and the garden had just been shut up. The shed was left full of her belongings and the gate had been locked, so it was completely overgrown. But when we started to look, it had all the edging tiles and all the original planting, although the roses had grown to the tops of the trees. It was just a magical sort of place. I realised that there was so much potential metaphorically for gardening in terms of what I was trying to do. It's about creation and failure and all my work previously had been about mans intent to recreate nature and messing with nature.

'Heather Morison is haunted by...', Beijing, China, 2003 Edition of 200 printed and mailed cards

GW: And was Jarman's garden played out in that way as well? Is it laid out in certain 'scenes'?

IM: Well what's kind of interesting about his garden is it's quite contentious because he created a garden at Dungeness, which is where they had built a power station because the land was of no real value, it was just all rocks and shingle but actually it's a very specialist sort of ecosystem, plants survive there in very harsh conditions. Jarman came along and introduced all these other plants, which messed up the local ecosystem quite a lot, and it was kind of interesting in that way. I didn't do it specifically because of that piece of work but I'd seen shots from the inside of it, and he has his little desk and his little window. So we kind of moved on really quickly then with the idea of the garden working better. So the cottage stayed there, and the sculpture stayed there, but that path for our work really just stopped at that point.

HM: But the garden needed so much doing to it, you literally couldn't even get in the garden. If you can imagine, it was full of huge bramble bushes. So it just started, the two of us just started to work on it, it was so rewarding because the more you worked on it the more you found and the more you discovered about it, in a very simple sense, because you started to reveal these Victorian plots, and a gooseberry patch, and magical things would happen because it had been left. We got to the back of the garden and there was a shed that had not been touched for years. It was like the old lady had just walked out, you know, there were jam jars full of sugar and a mouldy teabag.

IM: There was an outsider art element to it. She had a dozen mac's and dozens of umbrellas in there, and the whole garden was covered in teapots hanging everywhere. It really felt like we'd just discovered it.

HM: I mean it wasn't like a conscious decision to make a work about the garden, it was just irresistible.

GW: At that point did you already have knowledge of gardens or gardening experience?

IM: No, that's kind of the point.

GW: OK. So it feels more like it was a challenge, the idea of opening up something.

IM: It really was about that idea of failure and of being a complete amateur or a beginner in a field and throwing yourself into it completely, through trying to discover it and having all these different experiences.

HM: I think it was the beginning of us not being artists talking about art but talking about other things. We'd be talking about the garden, because that's the thing we were doing and we'd find people who were interested in gardening to talk to, because we needed advice on everything. It was the beginning of the way of working that we have.

IM: We always found a way of talking about art through talking about gardening like in the film 'Being There' staring Peter Sellers. Peter Sellers plays a character who has been raised and lived in this one house all his life where his only contact with the outside world has been television. He had been raised by a wealthy recluse, the owner of the house, and now worked as the gardener. His boss dies and the house just gets shut up and he gets put on the street and all he knows is about gardening and he only speaks in gardening terms. Then he's taken in by this billionaire, who takes him to be a genius of some kind. It's so profound because all these politicians keep asking him what to do next and he just answers, you know, 'you should plant your bulbs in autumn when the wind is...' it's amazing.

HM: They think he's speaking in incredible metaphors but actually he's speaking literally.

IM: But we sort of found that, you could get people down to the garden, curators would come down to the garden and you'd just have to talk about gardening to them. You'd talk about so much more in a way; it works really well for us.

HM: It's not like it was calculated in any way but it worked for us because it felt so comfortable because that's who we are, and that felt like a really comfortable way to work. Because I think, especially for me, I'd been really skirting around the idea of being an artist, so I wasn't really practising until we got this garden. Because I just found I couldn't find a comfortable way in at all. I found art talk really dull and it just didn't feel comfortable but the garden felt comfortable.

GW: So it sounds like in a way you were able to find a subject and context all combined together, which allows enough space for so many options.

HM: And it allowed us to work together as well. We we're working together as much as we were two artists and we were married, but the garden gave us a common point, to start to talk about what might be our practice.

IM: I used the garden in my final MA show, and I guess that's the point that we realized that the garden was a subject really. I'd been doing lots of work on it just photographing it, not the garden as a whole but close-ups of flowers and plants. So I had this collection of a thousand slides of the garden. I just started ordering them. I ended up putting them in an order according to an old edition of a Royal Horticultural Society colour chart and then I realised that was it, you know, trying to order it in different ways, find order within it, observing it and observing our own problems in trying to explore it.

'Colours in Ivan Morison's garden', 2000 35mm slide projection of 160 slides (detail)

HM: It took ages before we could really see what we were doing. We just were doing what we thought we wanted to do, but actually if you'd of asked us some time ago, we wouldn't have been able to tell you what was going on.

GW: So in that way you are totally immersed in the activity, you're following it through. But, at the same time, you are thinking about producing art.

IM: Yes, we're not actually immersed with it, we're standing there quite capable of producing something, to be honest.

HM: Yes.

GW: So when, you want to find out about a new type of plant that you want to put in a border or something, that can be calculated and linked to what that might lead to?

IM: Well in the beginning it took the form of an artist pretending to be a gardener, performing as a gardener and all the cards sort of build out of this character, this fictitious character, Ivan Morison in this garden.

GW: Did the cards start almost straightway?

IM: Yes. Yes, I realised that was sort of the most important element to the garden. There are different reasons why I did the cards. One, because when people come and see you to talk about work, it's good to come and visit somewhere specific. In a studio it's not always very satisfactory, but if there is one place that is always there and it's always the work, and it doesn't matter when they come, it's the right time, it's the work then they're visiting everything in one go, they're getting a full experience all the time. The cards were also an attempt to be able to produce work which we could distribute to whoever we wanted to and we knew then that they'd see it and experience it. We weren't then reliant on being in any shows, because it was early days, we had to go out and get work, so we could just post you a card if we wanted you to see our work. We could keep posting them to you, you can't stop us posting them to you, you know. And so it was just a way of getting our work seen, but then we also realised it was just a perfect expression of the garden. We started getting comments back from people that they were really just connecting with this garden, they found this garden very provocative and beautiful or disturbing or whatever, but they had a picture of what was going on, and we realised they were working more than mail shots, they were actually working in themselves.

GW: Were the first cards sent out with an indication that they were from you?

IM: This is really an important thing, they are essentially just out of the blue. They always had my name on them actually, either 'Ivan Morison is...' or just a list of colours in Ivan Morison's garden and so on. But there wouldn't be any return address, just a plain envelope so it makes people do a little bit of work if they want to find out more about it. So all the cards were, kind of a grand design of the Morison's garden, and we were working together.

HM: Yes and then we had a sort of opening, like an event for the garden. So there was a weekend opening, and that was the one where Ivan won the scarecrow competition...

IM: It followed the idea of running a festival there and having a yearly open day. We invited loads of 'art' people along to this garden open day to come and see our 'arts'. But then the gardens full of gardeners because it was a garden open day. So we had this really fantastic mixture of people there, some people just there to see gardens, some people just there to see art and some people sort of knew what the mix was. No one questioned it and everyone had a really nice day.

HM: We had been sending cards for about eighteen months then, so there were lots of invitations sent out and loads of people came up from London to have a look, and it was great.

GW: But in a way it sounds like you managed to balance up an in-between from being immersed in the situation and just observing it. There was an authenticity to add to your involvement in it, it's not cynical and it's not naive.

IM: You have to be in the middle somewhere.

GW: So it's quite a tricky thing that you managed. But maybe it is because, as you said, because you just were doing what you wanted to do.

HM: We know how to do that now, to negotiate that sort of path in-between those two things. Because so many artists make work from a cynical point of view or they take something like gardening from a naive point of view - the quirkiness. But if you're going to make a work about something or you're going to engage with something, you need to add value to it in some way, there needs to be something new said, and that's really important to us. It does take a long time sometimes to get to that place because we really try and negotiate that.

GW: Maybe that's a good point to ask you about the notion of your work being research and the stages of research. What do you consider research in the work or are there parts that aren't revealed and are revealed, what's the difference or relationship between those parts?

HM: Do you mean research is the bit that you don't show, is that what you mean?

GW: I guess traditionally, you could have the research stage that leads to a research outcome or maybe in a scientific method you show the entire research process up to a point, and then a little bit of a result at the end.

IM: What's kind of interesting and what's important about the garden is this whole process and why we got there, that piece of work does exist with that layer. So I mean all that getting to that point, I think that's all traditionally researched, and then we started making cards at some point probably a year into that story. But now, you know, we're sort of backtracking and talking about how we got there and all the research we did in order to get there, yet that's all doctored as well, you know, to become a story to tell you and tell other people.

GW: But do you think, looking back, almost through the cards you can pull out moments where real actions were taking place and alterations were made, and you could say that it was all art, that the formative actions and the cards are some sort of announcement that art was talking place here in this garden?

IM: Nice, yes. People would say, 'well what makes all this stuff you're doing art', and 'you just seem to be doing what the hell you like all the time'. I think it is consciously stopping at some point and it's like making an announcement in some way, so that's what the cards do. Because we could carry on through our lives doing all the stuff we'd like to do, and not make any more art, but there has to be some sort of indication that what you're doing is art, you know, in some way, a card, a photograph or a film or whatever it is you do, how do you do it.

HM: There's a link between ourselves as 'Heather and Ivan', and our relationship, because it does come in to everything all the time. Like one of the last cards we did actually got people worried, I think they felt that we were having some kind of marital dysfunction, that we were going to split up, and we wrote that story for people, that doesn't always happen with artists, they don't always introduce the personal into it. We get really close to the mark, sometimes you get a real glimpse of us and sometimes you don't, sometimes you get a really good glimpse of who we'd like to be, you know. It is never in a sort of Tracey Emin style, we're not kind of digging into to our lives, in that sense. But when you see the work as a whole, you do tend to get a glimpse and it will be interesting when our baby's born, as it will come into it somehow.

GW: But what if we take a sort of studio practice, and the first thing to come to mind is Francis Bacon. I think of Francis Bacon and I also think of the stories of him getting drunk and knowing the bars that he would go to and the friends he was with. But if I say what Francis Bacon's art is, his artworks, I wouldn't say that those stories are his art, I would say that's part of the mythology of the artist, but his artworks are the physical paintings. And although it becomes a little bit more complicated later when his studio is sort of revered and presented in a sense, and it is such a chaotic kind of space. But I still don't think that was his intention to make the studio his art. So there's different zones of production somehow, and although we know about his stories, we aren't told that's where the art is, and it's very clear, the distinction. But in a way I'm just thinking how much more blurred it is here because the cards could be seen as artworks in their own right, but the format of them and the way that they're declaring something, it only seems like it's part of it and that they are meant to say that other things going on are the artwork, although we may not be able to really go and experience them at first hand. There's quite a difference going on in there which is hard to unwrap.

IM: The cards sort of announce that there's life going on, that our lives are going on.

HM: I do like that kind of idea that we're doing all this stuff, and we have ups and downs, we might have some bad luck or something or we might have an argument and that sort of brings you back to this whole, because we're really interested in success and failure, and we love failure, I love it when things don't go right. Because sometimes when things, aren't going as you expect them to, that's when all the interesting stuff happens.

GW: But do you think, moving out here to Wales and having the arboretum, you were looking for a larger terrain to work in?

HM: Yes.

GW: I think you might have said earlier about the limits of the garden and whether you were trying to expand the limits, trying to show more of life.

IM: There's many reasons, I think, for getting the wood and starting the arboretum. One of the things we are doing is trying to build up a mythology, but it's like a semi-fictional narrative slowly unfolding about ourselves. So the story's gradually unfolding about our lives, I guess, that's what our work is. And some of those bits are true and some are a little bit made up. The arboretum existed within our work for many years before we actually went ahead and started it, because we've talked about it a lot, about the idea of an arboretum. And that's one of those things that's actually now turning to reality. And yes it's about expanding the potential of the garden. The garden's great, it's working for us, but with gardening, you're stuck in the garden all the time, all year, it constrains you. What we wanted was a long-term project for the rest of our lives, but which then also makes us go and do other things which gives us reasons to go to places, a list of things we have to do, an itinerary for our life, we have to go and collect the trees from here and there, we have to go everywhere to get the arboretum, to complete the arboretum.

GW: Is that because of doing the tour across China and making the 'Chinese Arboretum' series, did that make you want to do that in real life?

IM: Well it did. We actually visited an arboretum in Finland and met with a guy whose grandfather had set up an arboretum, and his father was running it and then his son had taken it over, and he walked us around. And it was a combination of him and a Finnish lady that we met as well. Her garden was a collection of plants she had collected from around the world, and the plants had special significance to her family or just journeys she'd made. Wherever she went she collected plants, and she could walk around the garden and tell us about her life. And this arboretum was this guy, you know, it was almost the same, but he could tell us about his grandfather's life through, say, a patch of Siberian larches. An amazing monument to their lives.

And that's really where we started to realise that it might have more potential for us in the long-term because we felt that the garden was constraining us. And we went to work abroad for a year and during that time we couldn't work on the garden.

GW: But you were still sending cards during that period?

IM: Of the garden, no. The next year we did that.

GW: That was when you went across China?

IM: Yes.

GW: And then you were sending cards from China, or were you not sending them?

HM: Yes we were sending cards and they were about people that we would meet along the way.

GW: But they were still in the same format?

HM: Yes.

No 91 in 'Chinese Arboretum' series, 2004 Installation Greenland Road, Sheffield

GW: But the trees, the 'Chinese Arboretum' photographs, I sort of see that as almost like telling the story of a country, it's like finding the history, by finding or following a route that no historian or anthropologist or botanist would follow. It's like that's some kind of added value then, that you've found another route.

IM: Yes, it's a sort of a strategy that I think we use in most of our work, trying to find an alternative way for looking at a place or a thing, like using gardening to look at art or trees to look at a country, birds to study people within a continent or something like that.

GW: So in this case you were because I want to get this straight, that you would ask someone where a tree is in China?

IM: Not where a tree is, we'd just ask them about trees. We'd just say, 'we're photographing trees in China, do you know of any?' A very simple way to talk to people about who and what we are. We'd just come from Russia and we had a terrible experience of people being very suspicious about who we were and what we were doing, because we were not working with traditional artistic methods. So when we went to China we thought we'd try something very simple, we were just photographing trees, and you can relate to that, trees are very beautiful, and why not travel around China photographing trees. And our method for finding them was, of course we did some research about where generally we might want to travel to and where good trees were, where the national parks might be and stuff like that. But our actual method on the ground was to talk to people, 'we're photographing trees and do you have any trees that you think would be worth photographing, any areas that you think might be worth visiting or any trees specifically that might have personal connections or any trees which are historically important or have some merit in some way.' And yes, certain people would say, 'oh go here and go there or there', it might work on a very local scale by suggesting one in the middle of the village. Or, 'well go and visit one in the Yellow Emperor's mausoleums, that's seven thousand years old, it's the oldest tree in the world,' or it might be 'go to Wolong National Park, that's got lots of trees in it.'

GW: But were you thinking of photographers like the Becher's, going around documenting? How were you seeing what you were doing as differing from their approach?

HM: Well for a long time the photographs weren't the work, the work was us travelling around China for six weeks. We didn't even get these photographs developed until we got back to Shanghai. We were using an old Chinese medium format camera, we had bought it from a man in the street in Beijing and off we went. We hadn't had one single image developed from that camera until after we finished all the travelling and the taking of the images for 'Chinese Arboretum'.

IM: We never used this sort of camera before for anything, so we didn't know if we were using it right or anything.

HM: I can honestly say because I can remember thinking at the time when we got the photographs developed in Shanghai, do I really care whether these come out or not and I didn't care whether they came out or not. Now, that piece of work has been shown in lots of places and is now part of a museum collection and become this really important piece of work. But I can honestly say I wouldn't have cared if it hadn't come out. We would have come up with a way of documenting what we'd done, you know, that we'd spent two months going around. But the thing is they came out and they were beautiful.

IM: The work wasn't about us travelling around China really, photographing the trees was a way for us to experience China and then the things we experienced would then become the work, they would inform our work.

GW: You could equate that to being research.

IM: It's a research methodology, yes. And our research was travelling around China, photographing trees and the outcomes were going to be the text cards or whatever they might be, people we'd met...But actually for that piece of work we ended up showing the research.

GW: Well you chose one you could say suitable or unsuitable, way into the reality. There's a bit of faith in that all those trees could be in one park. Probably not, because when you see all the different qualities, but I kind of like the idea that you didn't know where it was going to lead to.

HM: I remember when we were doing it, because we were away a lot, we got quite good at keeping in contact with people. So we were talking to, you know, art people, curators etc while we were away. I remember emailing people and telling people what we were doing at that point, and feeling at that point that we were doing the artwork, we were putting on a performance. I would try to write very eloquently about this performance piece that were doing right now that you're missing out on. I loved it because we had such great conversations about it, or where is it, this freedom just to be able to experiment with where or what was the stage and where was the art happening. I loved the fact that it became this legend, this story that we told, you know, and that you can come and talk to us about it we'd tell you about the work that we did and that we have nothing to show for it, and we liked that idea.

No 66 in 'Chinese Arboretum' series, 2003 Medium format slide projection

IM: Coming off the back of that Akademgorodok piece the fictional sky writing piece, its the same thing, or a similar thing, we didn't actually do the thing there but we came up with the documentation.

GW: Yes. But you declare it much more clearly in that piece in a way, because you produced and develop a fiction with a very known form of fiction, a novel.

IM: Yes, that's true.

GW: Is that the first time that was done so clearly that you were revealing yourself in some way?

IM: It was presented as an actual thing we had done though.

GW: Oh OK.

IM: In the front of the book it actually states we did this event, you know, but you're not quite sure whether the fiction begun there or before or after that.

GW: So that is like a tease in a way then, to use the novel.

IM: Actually we really liked the idea of writing and developing a novella to document an artistic action. It being almost a very unsuitable way of doing it because you can't see it, and yet skywriting is such a visual thing to do. Like the garden, the garden's a very visual, and just to give these very cold, clinical cards out about it. We hoped that peoples' experience of the garden would seem so much stronger because they only get these cards, like if we sent you nice coloured photographs of the garden every time, you might think that's alright but I've seen nicer.

HM: Yes, you know they've seen a garden before.

GW: So then the next level of declaring what it is, is the science fiction novel, which I haven't read but I'm guessing has very fantastical things within it so that you know you didn't do all of these things, that it is not presented as being factual.

IM: Yes. We took the ship after China to New Zealand. It was a month-long journey, it was a cargo ship, and we wrote the novel during that journey. So it was a month-long piece of work, like a performance in itself. We're going to take a boat, it's going to take a month, and every day we're going to write a chapter, and at the end of the journey we're going to get off and the book's going to be finished.

GW: Right.

IM: So even if it's a crap book, the piece of work is in the doing it. It's kind of a remarkable thing to have done. The book is about two people sitting on a boat writing a science fiction book, but then things happen to them. We wrote it day-by-day as things happened within the ship. We finished it as we stepped off the boat in New Zealand.

GW: Were you thinking of that in relation to what a traditional form of science fiction should reflect, the politics of the day or a current situation?

HM: Basically we knew nothing about science fiction.

IM: It's like the gardening, you see, we chose a subject we knew nothing about.

HM: So we thought we'd research it, but then you've got to understand we were in Russia at the time, so the only books we could get hold of were from Russia, Mongolia and China. So you can imagine that some of the books were a bit shit. One in particular that influenced us a lot was this book called 'Crab's Moon' which is written by Guy N. Smith, I think? He's Welsh and he lives in Pembrokeshire, he writes loads, hundreds of science fiction novels. This one was about giant crabs attacking a Welsh coastal town, going on holiday to this place, a sort of caravan park and then big crabs coming and eating people. It's really bad. But I picked it up in Shanghai and then I realised that what kept going on in a lot of this really terrible science fiction, was they have to have lots of sex in it, you know.

IM: Each chapter had exactly the same structure, didn't it?

HM: Yes. So you know, as soon as anyone started having sex that they'd get eaten by a crab.

IM: So they'd set the situation of a young lady with big boobs, she starts having sex, gets eaten by a crab.

HM: Yes, they were all big boobed women. Also we decided to think about, the sort of stereotypical kind of science fiction reader. However now we've really got into science fiction and we know quite a lot about it and we've read some really good science fiction. But at the time we thought yes, lots of sex in it, because at least if it's a really terrible story about aliens, it was an alien invasion story, at least we'd have lots of sex people could read. So there's quite a lot of sex, all different kinds of sex.

IM: In terms of science fiction, it's almost spoof science fiction, I would say.

HM: Well I don't like that, I think thats a cop-out because I think it's actually well written.

IM: Some people have said it's not actually science fiction, that the science fiction is secondary to what it actually is.

HM: There's a couple in it called Ruby and Seth, who are writing a science fiction novel, which is supposed to make you think they're like us, but we killed them off half-way through it.

GW: Do they have a lot of sex first?

HM: No, this is the thing, they don't have sex because they've got a real big problem with each other and they haven't have sex for months. All the sailors are having sex, lots of homosexual encounters and gangbangs.

IM: There's not that much sex in it

GW: I'm going to read that tonight when I get home.

IM: The first chapter, there's quite a lot of hot cock action in that.

HM: Ivan would write one chapter and then I'd write another chapter and then, as we went on, we'd sort of take on different characters. Ivan wrote an anal sex scene by himself one morning while I was somewhere else. When I read it, I was like 'oh my god'.

It's was very enjoyable writing it but really hard work actually. It illustrates that we work very differently to each other. I would procrastinate for as long as possible and then I'd do something in half an hour. Whereas Ivan, who is more diligent, would sit for two or three hours every morning.

GW: You've still got the setting, the scenario where you did actually do that journey.

HM: Yes.

IM: It is still in progress. We published it in the appendix of a catalogue. The idea is to try and then get it published as a proper science fiction novel, which is something we've not moved on to yet. There's no rush, you know, the longer it's sort of stretched out the nicer the story of it becomes in a way. So we'll send it out to lots of publishers, does it get rejected? Does anyone end up publishing it? Which would be remarkable. It's that whole process, I guess.

GW: Would you like to put it out in to the proper novel publishing world?

IM: That whole progress is quite interesting and enjoyable and it might make some interesting situations.

GW: You mentioned earlier, I think it was about the sign writing, saying that actually at the start you knew that you wouldn't be able to do the sign writing in the sky, but you still tried to pursue it knowing that it would be pretty much impossible.

IM: Yes, we had the idea and thought it might be possible and we did try and get it done. At that stage we'd been forced to stop so many different pieces of work we wanted to do, we kind of just thought well bugger them, we're going to make the work anyway. I mean what do you need to make the work? Its just the documentation at the end of the day.

HM: There are other artists that do that more than we do. When we were in New Zealand we set out to go and record the Kakapo parrot, quite a large flightless green parrot which lives on Cod Fish Island. There's only about forty left in the world. At that point we were mad keen on birds so we thought, we'd choose probably one of the rarest birds in the world. You could get on to Cod Fish Island, but only under special conditions.

IM: You had to convince them of the necessity for you to go there.

GW: And how did you do that exactly?

IM: We made every effort and to appeal to every kind of official conservation body that we could, and we recorded that whole process of us trying to do that.

GW: But was the objective to record the sound of the bird? To keep that for prosperity in case they all vanished?

'Alice the Kakapo', Cod Fish Island, New Zealand, April 1981 C. R. Veitch, Crown Copyright, Department of Conservation, New Zealand

IM: Yes, we'd read that they make this amazing sound but in the end we couldn't get on to the island and we just couldn't do it. In the end we asked them to give us some recordings of it and a photograph of the bird. So we had this recording and a photograph they sent us anyway. And we're not quite sure with that one, its kind of an odd thing. Like we didn't actually get to do it but we have the sound recording and they're quite remarkable things. We used the photograph for some things in the past and the sounds as well. It has come up in our work as little bits, they're just bobbing along.

HM: You could really pursue that line, that sort of methodology and become quite antagonistic, you know, in that sense, like a catalyst, poking about and asking the wrong questions. Where as that's not actually how we work, there is a genuine interest in the end product normally. You could just do that to get the debate going. We like the discussions, I'm not afraid of a bit of conflict, I like to have an interesting conversations about things. But for us it's much more gentle and probably slightly more genuine in some respects, we are actually interested in the thing that we want to get to, you know.

GW: Can you say a few things about the ways that working with the wood now opens up other opportunities, or even if they're just beginnings of ideas, things that you want to pursue. You know, there's one obvious thing that comes to mind, is that you've mentioned working with other people on the site, whereas it seemed like the garden and other travels have always been about you two and your work. So that seems like that's quite a big shift.

IM: Yes, it is, isn't it?

HM: We've probably come to a point where we feel really comfortable together, working together, if you could imagine from when we did the garden then moving on and then doing all the other bits and working abroad that was actually very challenging, personally for the two of us, making work in situ. You're not quite sure what your getting and what any of the work's going to lead to. It's almost like we've gone and worked so close together, you know, that we're living in each others pockets. Whereas actually here, we've got separate studios which is quite nice, but we still work together but it feels really natural and really comfortable and at the right time, for example, to talk to you about building some sort of structure in the wood. I think we are in a really good position to be able to sort of share with other people.

GW: When you're working in the two different studios, are you working on different aspects that might come together in the same works?

IM: It has taken quite a long time to work out how best to work together. I think when we started working together each us didn't know the others strengths or we did everything together which is really an uneconomical and inefficient way to work. We were constantly tripping over each other, in terms of doing everything twice and any bit of writing we'd have to do, each bit would be edited by each of us. Whereas now, we sort of deal with different projects and then we just consult each other as we go along. Of course we talk every day about everything, but we just lead on different things.

GW: And that's what leads to opening up, bringing in other people?

IM: I think so, it's hard to go from working by yourself to working as a pair, it's an ego thing I guess. But once you let go of that, you realise how much better it is and how much more fun it is, and how you can do stuff which you never expected. Your work, becomes so broad, you can start doing stuff you never thought you might do. So I think that's why we would like to work with other people. And I think the wood and the arboretum does give us that wonderful opportunity, like we have something of interest.

GW: Is there a relationship to how you might form the arboretum here in terms of how you locate the knowledge, how you choose which plant or trees or which people or which projects?

IM: Exactly. Well we're still working through how that process is going to work really because obviously you could be quite scientific about it and have like a list of trees to tick off, for example the next one on the list is in South America, so we have to go there and collect it. Or it can be a little bit more like that 'Chinese Arboretum', a little bit more natural and just people recommending us to go and find trees in this place and that place, a little bit more intuitively led, I don't know.

HM: I think that there are certain kinds of trees that we want in our wood just because, well for me because aesthetically I want to have them and also I do have an idea of what this arboretum might look like in fifty years' time, you know. And also there's something else about the arboretum, which is this sort of slight Victorian-ness, a control of nature. For the Victorians it was the thing, to have an arboretum, if you were a very posh Victorian. You just need to go up to Port Meirion, Clough Williams-Ellis created this whole landscape based on his grand tours. It's all manmade really, and I rather like that and I'd like to do a bit of that, it's quite serendipitous in terms of what you were suggesting. You could also construe that as being quite a naive way to collect trees because they might not actually survive in this climate and so it might not look good, and at the end of the day I'm an artist and I want it to look good and create the atmosphere that I want. And, we've been doing research in terms of what native trees there might be, but I really I like the idea of putting some non-native trees in, I mean down the road, just near the pub, there's a Gingko. I like the control that I might have in introducing something like that, seeing what might happen.

GW: Is there a class issue within the tree structures then, because the arboretum is almost like a display of control that separates classes in some way? It could come down to the idea of having a pampas grass in your front garden that distinguishes you as a certain level in society or can that vanish in the wood in a way?

HM: I think it's more to do with having a grand idea, having a big idea. I suppose that's Victorian in a sense as well, thinking in the long-term. I'm thinking about fifty years time and I'm thinking about being buried here and having a lovely great, big headstone, Ivan's going to have a big, huge tower.

IM: A phallic tower. I'd like my body to be shot out of it in a rocket, but the big tower stays as a monument to that event.

HM: Having a big idea, that's how we approach most of our work, not being phased by having a massive idea.

All images copyright the artists 2006

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