Caspar Heinemann spoke with artist Oreet Ashery, exploring Heinemann’s exhibition, Sod All.

Heinemann’s work draws from the aesthetics of folk art and vernacular architecture, investigating the intersections of spiritual, political, and sexual countercultures. Oreet Ashery’s work avigates counter-cultural aesthetics, whilst challenging ideological, social and gender constructs through a diverse range of media, including photography, video, text, performance, and artefacts.

The pair discussed how Heinemann’s residency at Studio Voltaire shaped the work through immersion in the building’s history and spaces and explored the layered meanings of the word 'Sod', considering translation, untranslatability and the coexistence of multiple interpretations.

Their conversation also examined ritual-like forms of engagement in the work, where transparency and concealment create intimacy, and moved to the complexities of contemporary Jewishness, its relationship to queerness, and the political responsibilities of dissent within that context.

Oreet Ashery: Can you hear me okay? Yeah. It's going to be a sound piece. Yes, it's great to see everybody. It's really nice to see you. I think we haven't seen each other for a long time.

Caspar Heinemann: No, we haven't.

Oreet Ashery: So that feels nice in itself. Yeah, it's a real privilege to be able to take time and really think in-depth about the work and about the whole ecology of your practice, your writing and what other people wrote about you. This exhibition I found quite complex and rigorous. My questions are very long and I have to read, so you have to bear with me. But I just didn't feel like it was something that I can just improvise. It just feels like – I selfishly want to get through everything.

Oreet Ashery: I'll start – I wanted to begin by grounding us in the space. I realised that part of the Studio Voltaire commission involves a residency. You stayed here, slept here at the back studio area and made some of the works here in the workshops and in the gallery. In connection to that, I read Francis Whorrall-Campbell’s interview with you in Frieze. When you spoke about the boundaries and borders, with a sense of some frustration perhaps, you described how a thing exists through its boundary, how its edge defines it. How one thing ends and another begins, like sky and earth or life and death. When I visited your show, I think it was Emma in reception? Somebody in reception was very nice and told me that this building used to be two separate buildings, now joined as one. That seemed to resonate perfectly with what you were saying about boundaries. One site, which is here, was a Methodist Church, the other, a carpet factory and that really stuck with me. I found myself curious in this building, not just about the gallery itself, but about what happens when you step beyond the limits of an art space into the cafe, the shop, the studios at the back, the other gallery space. It made me think about how we assign different values to different spaces, how some are seen as more important than others. We often place the gallery above the shop, the cafe, or the studio. But I didn't feel that here when I was here. I spent quite a lot of time and I was really struck by that, moving around the spaces. That's not to undermine the exhibition at all. On the contrary, a sense of sensitivity to the placement of art in the world and a certain dialogue with it.

Oreet Ashery: I wanted to ask you about that, about the period of your residency here, the feeling of the building itself. How did the space and the duration of your stay affect the process of making the work? And what did some of the making processes entail?

Caspar Heinemann: Yeah, it was interesting because on the residency, me and Nicola, the Curator, talked about this. I was almost self-conscious about how, let's say, externally unproductive I was because I was aware that everyone was seeing me every day. It's when the Jake Grewal show was on and I was lurking around and spending time looking at the ceiling and coming in and out, going to the gym in Clapham. I just lived in this 100-metre radius of Studio Voltaire for a few weeks. I think because my making process in Glasgow was so embedded in my small life there I almost didn't know how to do it. Then that became something in itself. It's really hard to say what the residency did, except that I feel like I spent a good amount of time just trying to get a feel for the space, which I think does make sense and resonates with what you're saying.

Oreet Ashery: Yeah and also the materials. I was thinking whether you found them, collected them, or ordered them in – what was the process of accessing the materials?

Caspar Heinemann: All of the above. Yeah, there's many sources. I'm trying to think of the... All the wood came from – shout out to the Glasgow Wood Recycling Centre! The reptile tanks are from reptile supply shops. My partner, Rachel, who's sitting at the back, runs a project space for young people, a lot of the materials are donated to them and are things that they can't necessarily use, but I can... hopefully, that's okay to say! Where people think their donations are going... I get the off-cuts!

Oreet Ashery: Okay, so I just want to move to maybe one of the overarching aspects of the work, or at least the context rate, which is around the word 'sod'. Yeah, I really enjoy reading the different reviews about the show. I was very in ‘detective mode’ because I noticed that not only does the word have so many meanings, but also between the different reviews, the meaning kept changing… also, because some of them were interviews with you, or conversations. So all that – how we change the way we speak about work all the time and how different writers might approach it differently. I was quite struck by that; I felt that sense of a system in the work. I felt that I was probably a good viewer in that sense. Yeah, looking for clues and trying to put things together. I was wondering about this, what multiple meanings create for you? So, the word has multiple meanings, and the works themselves really operate on multiple sets of meanings. Are there gaps between how words have different meanings and objects and that area?   

Caspar Heinemann: Yeah, it's interesting. I think when I was first explaining it to people, I was finding myself, especially with the Hebrew, emphasising that it's an untranslatable word. Then the more I thought about it, I was like, there's something quite funny about that because that's just all words. There's no such thing as a translatable word, really, because they all have all of this cultural package that it's impossible to unpack or present any other words as a real equivalent to it. I think there's something for me in just things being able to be multiple things at the same time in a way that doesn't diminish the extent to which they are, any of the things that they are. Also, in highlighting... I go back and forth between, of course, there's a gap between the thing itself and the words we use to describe it, and then being like, maybe there's not actually. We don't have any more access to it than we have being able to see it, or, to be there isn't more access than the words necessarily.

Oreet Ashery: Yeah, I really felt that sense of myself moving between those meanings and then looking for them and literally reading the room and reading the space and I was thinking about what that did. I was thinking that the 'sod' also means soil. And in fact, it feels almost intentionally ungrounded. There is no real – for me – ground or soil in that sense, because everything is high up, propped high up on trestles or on the ceiling, apart from Scarer, apart from this work, that's three of three, which is very much on the ground. For those who haven't seen this red paint on the floor, which grounds it into the floor further. I was thinking about that, also because ‘sod’ is topsoil. I'm thinking about rootedness and maybe it exists purely on the surface without depth of rootedness. I wanted to ask about that tension, about your relationship to rootedness and its opposite – displacement, disorientation, or maybe not opposite, but those senses that we have when we're grounded in a work or in an installation or in a show, and then we feel slightly, a sense of disorientation. I think this 3D work really helps with that. That sense of disorientation felt quite productive. I was wondering about that…

Caspar Heinemann: Yeah, it's interesting. There was at one point going to be a much more literal grounded element, which I ended up taking out. I think that there was something about wanting to get really deep into the embeddedness of the metaphor of ground and sky. We're, the ‘sod’, we're just in it without needing to do anything. I think that the Dead Ducks work was about trying to… we're, in a way, on the same side of that divide as we always are, but it's also flipped. I think it feels like it's something about the de-normalisation of how things are. Thinking a lot about the persistence of the ‘world turned upside down’ metaphor as a way of thinking about how things could be otherwise. Then also this thing of 'sod' being what's underneath, but also the highest level of mystical interpretation…those things co-existing.

Oreet Ashery: That's really interesting. I felt that quite active engagement, which I'll come back to in a bit. But yeah, I'm sort of moved in different directions within the space and the works because things are not what they seem and because of the upside-downness of things and what for me also feels like queer methodologies as well in the space. When I walked around, it just felt like, maybe it's a little bit harder to sense it now, but the work felt like a circle and, 'sod' is also circular or ‘council’ in translation from Hebrew, like a gathering. The Scarer is...It's placed directly on the floor and has a superficial quality. It reminded me – and my references are very trashy – of TV rituals like a survivor on Love Island, where they go to the firepit – around the fireplace – and they're kind of, in a self-selection ceremony. But there is a sense of a collective ritual with that circle, and that felt relevant. When I came here, two people – and one was trying really hard to show the other person how to look through, and they did all sorts of things, like physical things, and took pictures for them, and it was really moving. I watched that, and I became part of it. There's a sense of ritual that I felt in the space. I'm wondering how much that was part of it, the sense of ritual, and immersive engagement?

Caspar Heinemann: Yeah, it's interesting. I guess the word ‘ritual’ is an interesting one. I suppose what a ritual is, in a way, is the manipulation of physical matter in an attempt to produce some external change. I think that's the way that I'd relate to that. I think taking seriously – the things – need to be exactly how they are as well.

Oreet Ashery: Yeah, I felt the exactness of it. I also felt this sense of what's visible and what isn't, what can be seen and what's hidden. When you look here, you see something that looks like a heart or something. I don't know really what it is... It's kind of, made of wax? I felt rewarded because I was like, Oh, I spent time looking and here I am, I'm seeing that. Then other things are hidden, like in this Scarer, I think that one is two of three. While the other one here, actually, when you look inside, you can actually see, are there plastic bags? You can see it's stuffed with something. So it's really the sense when we look at sculptural objects and it's this mysterious transformation, Oh, it transformed, and that gives it a certain value. But I really like the transparency and that interrelation between transparency and opaqueness and how that operates and what's hidden and what's seen… and nothing is fully revealed and nothing is fully hidden. And that felt intimate. And that also quite felt sexual. Just this idea of these rules and something you know and you don't know and you see and you don't and something is very exposed – that something else is hidden. When you think about secrets and the nature of them is, they're always going to be revealed in some way and that's part of it. That sense of intimacy, something quite… almost sexual in that relationship to an opaqueness and transparency. I just wanted to ask you about this sense of intimacy.

Caspar Heinemann: Yeah, the secret thing is interesting because I think for me, that does really relate to language. Again…how do I put this… It's like a level of shared understanding that we assume that things have gone… I don't want to use a very… I hope they wouldn't mind me saying, but my parents have this dynamic where they often have a disagreement about something and then both come away from it feeling like they are on the same page and they've agreed, and they've actually agreed on completely different things. I think that's probably happening all the time in ways that we're just not aware of because they don't become fictional. It's this level of good enough understanding or good enough commonality. I think about that with the objects where it's important to me that there are always these codes that people will pick up on in different ways and that there's an intimacy when people get them, so to speak, but that they're generous, I hope, in a way that completely exceeds that, but it doesn't require knowledge of the reference.

Oreet Ashery: Again, I was thinking about those forms of engagements and I was thinking about something that I was quite fascinated by, which was an exhibition that was curated in 1929 by Dora Benjamin, who's a Walter Benjamin's sister. It's called Healthy Nerves. It's a really interesting exhibition about art and health and addiction and mental health. Walter Benjamin wrote a thorough review of the exhibition. He wrote quite prophetically, as he does, about attention span and how we experience work and he wrote about contemplation as being something that is quite passive, and he wasn't happy with an exhibition that makes you just walk around and contemplate it. Maybe that sense felt a bit bourgeois to him as well. He talked about something that activates him, but at the same time not shocking. I was quite interested in that. Okay, he wants it activating, but not shocking. He felt like Dora's, the way she curated the show, exactly achieved that. I think there was something about these that also felt this sense of being quite carefully managed between forms of engagement. I wanted to ask you if you have a sense of… do you have what would be an ideal form of engagement with your work, or not really at all?

Caspar Heinemann: Yeah, it's interesting. I think there's maybe a few different ones. When you were talking about the TV references earlier, something with the Scarers that I was thinking about a lot was genre fiction and movies and horror movies, especially as a way of approaching things that are unthinkable or unfeelable on some level. I guess that's what I'm trying to do in making them. I suppose that's what I'm hoping to facilitate in other people… that experience of... I think I want it to be like a point in towards something that you can't quite grasp. And to be in that experience of that not quite being able to grasp it and be – maybe acclimatise ourselves to a greater comfort of that space. Maybe that's my ideal engagement.

Oreet Ashery: Yeah, and I think the time machines are really to draw people in. I spend a lot of time just looking through the different…like I said, I saw people spending a lot of time with it. So there's different strategies that speak to that. Anecdotally, I went for a walk in Gloucestershire, in a place called... It's slightly where my studio is at the moment. I went for a walk in a place called Heartbreak Quarry, and I just love the the name of the quarry. There's a mountainous forest, and there was this birdhouse and I thought of your birdhouses from the Cabinet show. This idea of… there's something quite artificial, how we create and I think it's very clear in your work as well, this sense of making homes for birds, like they need us or something, that kind of thing. But yeah, just the name of the place and walking there. I wanted to send you a picture and I didn't. I was just thinking about what makes you, what makes you feel heartbreak at the moment?

Caspar Heinemann: Yeah, I feel like... So for reference, Eric did send me the questions in advance – that's not a surprise. I was thinking about this today. The show feels like it's a lot about grief, which was to do with a lot of different things that were going on at the time of making. I had a relationship of seven years and one of my best friends died the same week. Then I know that we're going to get on to this, but in a global sense, as a I'm extremely heartbroken about what is... I don't know if you would like relate to me saying, like our tradition in this context, I'm heartbroken about what is going to... This is obviously not the biggest heartbreak of the situation, but this is the position that I'm thinking from. I trust that other people have the heartbreak of the situation as a whole, not that anyone could hold it. But I'm like, What is going to be left of Judaism after this? I know we're going to get onto that. But trying to think of different ways of relating through all of that pain.

Oreet Ashery: Yeah. I'm feeling this heartbreak. I just want to acknowledge it. It's in the show, I'm sure we all feel it. When I was here, when I was walking around the show, it felt almost like... That was before I read the Frieze review, I didn't know where you were in your life. But I literally felt like these were a series of obituaries. It just felt almost like that. Whether it's the Dead Ducks, or these look kind of like blood is filling and things are covered. It's just in the room and the energy. I was thinking, is there more death or is there more life for you in the show?

Caspar Heinemann: They're just completely inextricable. It's one of those things that's obviously very easy to say, as a platitude. But especially after my friend died, I had a few months, I would say, where I felt this extreme clarity about what's important. I was like, if only it was possible for everyone to stay in this place. You can't, it's too much, it's too intense. I think it's not... People don't normally talk to me in public. I think I've quite a closed energy. But in the month afterwards, I just kept having interactions with strangers and people kept coming up to me. I think it's because on some level I was open to it in a way that I'm not normally open to it… I can't actually remember the question?!

Oreet Ashery: Is there more death or more life? haha.

Caspar Heinemann: It just is both…!

Oreet Ashery: Yeah, I really felt that. Yeah, this is where I felt really what you were saying about boundaries and how things are defined by the boundaries, slipping and melting away and that sense of aliveness, which is related to the joy of making the work because it feels like there's a lot of pleasure. Then, there is that sense of assistance. There's something quite dogged about how the work is made. But then there's certainly deep grief without actually naming it, which felt very intermingled and almost foggy. I really appreciate walking almost in that fog and having that outlet to allow me to feel grief and being able to come, particularly with the word, with the Hebrew word, its connotation, knowing your work, and just being able to have some of that in the space. I wanted to ask you something about Jewishness as well. More specifically, when I read your... part of your your writing... I read something that you wrote last year for Art Monthly about Nicole Eisenman's work on show, which I found really interesting around radical Jewishness and how... I won't get into it in too many details. You can read the article. But it was in a sense how Jewishness doesn't really fit into identity politics.

Oreet Ashery: It's this and it's there and it's not. It's many things. Is it a race? Is it a religion? All those kinds of questions. What is a Jew? All that. Because of those complexities, people tend to, when they write about her work, they tend to really not touch too much on the fact that it has that layer to it and deeply politicises the work as a result. I think for me, in general, when I think about the art scene in the UK, I mean, everywhere, really… in the West, but particularly in the UK, I feel like there's very little dialogue around contemporary Jewishness and contemporary queer Jewishness. What does that mean? I found it, particularly now, because there's such a rupture in Jewishness. My own experience of it is going to environmental communities that are based on Jewish values. There's one in Kent, there's one in Devon. They're intersectional, they're queer, but they're looking into Jewish traditions of social justice, for example, the full justice in the context of the UK and land work in the UK. Also, these things like The Queer Yeshiva, these are a reckoning with Jewishness through queer lenses, trying to re-evaluate what's going on. Then there's a loud rupture around anti-zionism and Zionism. And yet it's very hard to find the discourse. I wanted to ask you, really. I'm really curious how you feel about that, because when I think of critical race theory or studies, or gender studies, as such a rich resource and outlet to look at work from those perspectives. But where do we go to for that?

Caspar Heinemann: Yeah, it's interesting thinking about it alongside queerness because I think in terms of the relationship of the work to queerness, I had this moment where something I feel like I've been quite invested in is being like, what makes work? What is queer art if it doesn't look like what people think of as queer art, if it doesn't do the visual tropes. Then it's funny because I feel like thinking about Jewish visual art and like, there aren't even tropes. There's a freedom in that, in a way. But also, I think a lot of the time It's, people just don't want to go there. I don't know, something I was thinking about quite a lot is that the – in a way, the central Jewish innovation is, there's one God and you can't see them. That as a relationship to the visual is complicated. I'm interested in that ambivalence towards representation that's like embedded in a tradition. For I think there's something very rich and fertile there. But it feels tied to this way that it means that it also slips outside of the categories of a lot of identity politics. I've been involved in Queer Yeshiva.

Oreet Ashery: Oh have you? How did you find it?

Caspar Heinemann: Yeah, we can talk about it. The short answer was – amazing, and life changing – because that sounds a bit onerous.

Oreet Ashery: The singing is incredible.

Caspar Heinemann: Yeah. I think from being involved in a lot of completely secular, often, very validly atheist, activist communities as a teenager, I really saw, especially people who have been doing it for 20, 30, 40 years, the amount of burnout and just the relationship to drugs and alcohol in a lot of those communities. I kind of had this feeling that there was something missing in how people were relating to that work or the sense of calling that they had around doing that work for justice. For me, it has to be spiritual for many reasons, but right now, if nothing else, because things are not going well. There's a way that… there's this word 'doykeit', like 'here-ness', which is a principle that a lot…I think it's radical Jewish organising. It comes from the Bund and this radical Yiddish leftist context. I think that as a model, for just like, okay, we're here now, what can I do in the world immediately surrounding me? Is the only way that I can really think about things. I think that Jewishness and the ritual practices have a lot to offer there.

Oreet Ashery: Yeah, it's difficult with that when you inherently are not supposed to represent the figure and you use the bird heads as they've been used in the Passover, the Haggadah and there were drawings of those bird heads as a... Yeah, replacing perhaps people or representations. But yeah and also for me, a lot of the symbolism has been hijacked as part of the Zionist National Project. In a way, in that way, the multiplicity of meaning around every symbol is so hefty and there's a sense of reclaiming and re-reclaiming and re-reclaiming. I really relate to what you're saying about, in a sense, where people are just doing it. When I go to the farms and they're doing it, I ask myself, why am I drawn? Why do I need to go to a Jewish farm? I think we all need to belong somewhere. I think the space for that is getting quite narrow, in a sense. Being there and just people doing it and in a sense, making perhaps new images through making with the land, without idealising it. I don't mean idealise that relationship to land or land work, which is actually quite tough and quite precarious. But I just mean more in... I'm very interested in making contemporary images around that or using words that are used around that.

Caspar Heinemann: Can I quickly –

Oreet Ashery: Yeah, absolutely.

Caspar Heinemann: Yeah. I think that also there's so much in Jewish tradition, it so points us towards such a strong critique of ethnonationalism. It's not the popular position right now, but it's there. There's a strong argument that one of the central themes of the Torah is if you decide to have a king, if you decide to try and be other nations, it's not going to go well. You know? Like, bad things are going to happen. Also, it's very explicit that no one owns the land and it's conditional on good behaviour.

Oreet Ashery: Yeah, there is certainly a… This is, again, where I feel this is again where, I feel this... Where the boundaries and the borders expand and contract in a really interesting way. There is a sense of loss around Jewishness as we're witnessing what's been done in our name. But at the same time, for me, there's also such a sense of hope in terms of those reckoning and in terms of really reevaluating. For me, mainly comes with queer thinking, but also very mental thinking, really reckoning with Jewish tradition, but also feeling it is ours, we can do that. We've done. It's also within Jewish tradition. There's always people who've been heretic or people that went against the grain. It's actually a really big part of it. So that sense of – Like working in the farming can, it's like we can grow what we want, but we can also grow something that is part of Jewish tradition. And that sense that it's ours and we can change the story. I feel very strongly about that because there is a sense, I think, particularly looking for the outside in, that Jewishness is quite fixed, but it's not at all. Not on an individual level and not on a community level. So yeah, I really feel that doing that you mentioned. Maybe this is something that, again, I was just curious about. Because of the landscape that you created here, I wanted to ask about, not necessarily pin you down to the question, but just ask what you thought. I was curious about the images that we see from Gaza and whether that visual landscape… does that feel – I mean, that's also a question to everybody. I'm quite curious what people think. I'm just wondering. I mean, for me, everything that I look at, I can't help myself… even when I see that, I can't help myself not having those associations because I'm exposed to it a lot. Just whether you feel that what we're witnessing and what we've seen has started to penetrate artwork, the way people make art in the UK at least?

Caspar Heinemann: Yeah, I think it'll maybe only be possible to see when, hopefully, God willing, this feels so distant that maybe we'll be able to see some of what that was more. But yeah, it feels unavoidably present. I don't know if you've read Ariana Reines' new book, Wave of Blood, but that was really helpful for me in trying to… It feels like trying to approach something again. When you're like, there's obviously nothing I can say about this, but you can't not say it.

Oreet Ashery: Yeah, I see it for myself, for example, if I make a mark or something, I'm wondering, is it unconsciously coming from what I'm exposed to, or not? Where to locate it? Like you said, are we too much in the middle of it now, or has it already been historicised? All those questions. I also see it with students. Students come in with work, trying to make sense of it in visual language. So I think that reckoning and rupture, I think I'm talking about, with the Jewishness also. I'm very curious in how that manifests around us in contemporary art and how that can start to enter people's visual language, in a sense, in a very first-world, North American way of thinking about… our sort of Expressionism after the Second World War, all those felt influential visual languages that started to penetrate the visual imagination, the massive imagination, and where that... But anyway, just for myself, when I walked here, especially with this work, but just with a feeling of it, that question came up for me, for sure. I think there's another question related to that, or maybe not a question, just a thought that I'm grappling with around: are we, as Jewish artists or artists who identify as Jewish, or artists who identify with Jewishness or Jewish ways of working – Jewish themes, do we have more responsibility than others? I know it's a big question. You dont have to answer that. I'm just thinking on that.

Caspar Heinemann: I think it's where the... I think a lot of people find themselves in this contradiction where it's the positive thought or the positive project around Judaism for a lot of people I know, or around Jewishness is, as I was saying before, that it's not centred around this national project, but also when things are being done in your name, that just is... Yeah, I think even if the only utility is just, and this feels so hopeless in a way, but even if all it is, it's just a record of the fact that not everyone agreed with this; there's an obligation to dissent, I think.

Oreet Ashery: Yeah and I feel like one more it's becoming, again, more blaring in a sense. I think maybe a year ago, there was this sense for people as a Jew, I feel this and this as a Jew. And now it's more like there's more of a global reckoning. It's more like as a person, I feel that. For me personally, I feel a hope in that because of the way everything is interconnected. I wanted to end on a couple of things. How are we doing for time?  It's 8:00 now? Okay, I'm going to be really quick. It's just a couple of questions that can bring us back to the UK or England. I saw a black and white image recently of tree houses, for The Alcon Tree Village, which was a site of protest, again, of proposed roadworks, the A30 Honiton bypass in Devon. I remember that in the 90s, it really left a big impression on me. I don't know if people saw these images of a tree house and people either living in these trees or hugging these trees. It made me feel like made me think again, of your – the tree, the bird houses, but also those things living on trestles, with almost like tree houses with the time machines. I mean, these are reptile tanks, there are ducks, there are types of crows, and your relationship to the nonhuman.

Caspar Heinemann: Yeah, I mean, it's... Most things are nonhuman. I think there are a few different… Again, it feels like it straddles this… It's partially about an encounter with otherness and the impossibility but the desire to think beyond how we subjectively experience the world. Then, the nonhuman, I feel, is a lot of our richest, oldest symbols and archetypes. Like with words, I think a lot of animals, especially, have this quality where there's a lot of human feeling invested in them in ways that we'll never really probably know how accurate our projections on the characters of different animals are, really…that they take on all of this intensity of meaning. 

Oreet Ashery: So again, perhaps something slightly metaphorical or slightly... That has multiple ways of reading. The last thing I wanted to ask you about, which I'm super curious about, is about folk revival. I'm kind of locating it in England, so yeah, I recently went to the New Ancient Festival in Stroud, which felt very much like a snapshot of a folk revival, kind of located… Jeremy Deller was there working and moved to that area, and it has a large fabrication building there. Just a sense of the YBA's trajectory from having the finger on the pulse in the '90s or creating a pulse in some ways. I think, yeah, but we also approach critically. But nonetheless, they've been influential and then almost moving to an interesting folk. I was very curious about that to see that. There was a strange, almost a weird sense of nostalgia for it. It was very about the now because a lot of young people are really engaged with it. I'm engaged with it in a sense, my studio is in a village there, so the materials that I'm working with are folky, and I'm thinking about what that means. I think a lot of people look at folk.

Oreet Ashery: I think this thing that white people do, and this shit that white people do. They were bighthawk. In the Morris Dance, there were not just white people interested in that… but mainly white people. But in the night, the night that I was, there were folk musicians, and Oren Williams, and Eilind Gale and Angeline Morrison, which was incredible, about Folk, but also talking about race and the bodies, but also something quite… more and more deep…in the music itself that was great. I'm really confused about yourself. I don't know what to do with that. It has such a bad reputation, but it's also quite attractive in some way. Yeah, how are you with that.

Caspar Heinemann: Yeah, it's interesting. I grew up going to... My dad, especially, is a folkie and so I grew up going to folk festivals and seeing Morris dancing and also storytelling as part of that… and Cèilidhs. I remember as a child being... just having a real sense of the power of those things and being like, what is this? I then became aware of the ways that a lot of those things get used in this reactionary way of imagining this non-existent past where things were better and simpler and there're only white people, but still having this, like there's something in this. I guess in some ways, I think there's a good lefty-folk revival answer about folk music being a working class culture. It is true that a lot of them are these songs of resistance to class oppression. There's something about... Obviously now it has its institutions, but something about the idea that before the songs were all collected and before it was enlivened that you don't need... No offence to the context or myself or anyone, but you don't need institutions for culture. I think there's something about that, like embeddedness of music and art and dance and all of those things in just the everyday life.

It's obviously a romanticisation in a sense, but it also makes me... It builds on a continuum with what was great about the punk scenes as well that I was involved in and queer scenes as well. It's like the culture exists for the benefit of the people making an experience in it and nothing beyond that. Then this term recently... because I remember when I was going to folk gigs as a child and teenager, especially as a teenager, I was normally the youngest person there by such a huge margin. Then recently, there's a lot more young queer people and people of colour getting into folk…and it's really interesting and really cool. I think there is something about – I went to see this really amazing country artist, Willi Carlisle, last week, and he was talking about this, where he was like, 'This just is the history.' It's horrible at times, but we need to be grappling with that and facing that and pretending that it's not there doesn't solve anything. Then I think also in terms of, and again, this is like a romanticisation because I would say land work is really hard, but also our current relationship to land is not good and it needs to change. As a way of reminding ourselves that things haven't always been like this.

Oreet Ashery: Yeah, this is actually really helpful. Thinking about it more, because I'm thinking of this CD that I got from the Land Workers Alliance recently, the folk collection. Some of it is people who grew up in pubs and working out class culture, grew up in pubs, singing pubs, and also, when I go to certain pubs where the studio is, it is a very living culture. It is class-related. Maybe a bit like what I said before, it's something about grappling with a sense of belonging. But with those... criticality of not idealising the past as something that is pure, but also not land work. The lyrics really bring home the real difficulties of being a land worker and the precarity of that and what that means. Yeah, and again, there is an interest in it. It's undeniable. People are drawn to it. It's interesting what people do with it. Perhaps, again, it's that thing where people feel like, yeah, I can do something. I can do whatever I want with it and make it my own. I think this is what I saw in the music part of the night, which was great. But I think, yeah, it's interesting around institutions and perhaps festivals come with their own baggage as well. But at the same time, give you a chance to see really good people. I think that's that. I think it is time for a few questions.

Nicola Wright (Curator, Exhibitions): I'm going to say thank you so much. That was such an incredible, complex discussion. I hope that you maybe have time for a couple of questions.

Audience 1: I've got a question about editorial and editing of the work and how you cut it out, what that process would look like, and is there an issue with the components in that account? How would it look like? How to stop? Are they are uncovered and you're continuing to respond and react with it, reclaim it into the world?

Caspar Heinemann: Yeah, it's interesting. I feel like I often have to spend a lot of time with something in my studio, staring, staring and trying to figure out what it's doing. Sometimes, something like the partially out of contextual necessity, but also it was how it was with the ducks. I had a vision and I was like, We're doing this, this is what it is, and we did it. But then with the Scarers, especially this one, which is the Scarer 1, it was…maybe it doesn't sound funny, but it took me such a long time. It was just in different forms in my studio for such a long time, and I felt like I couldn't really figure it out.

Even when I was installing here, I was like, It's still not quite right. I ended up changing a couple of things at the last minute. It. Then, yeah, it's kind of pure intuition. I don't really know why it gets to the point. With the Scarer 3, that was, I'm not going to say an accident, but I dropped it. When I was trying to figure out how they were going to work, I was in my studio, I was really frustrated, and I was like, I'm just going to do something else because it's fallen apart and it's annoying. Then I was sitting at my desk, which looks out over the rest of the studio, and I was like, oh, that's it. I've sorted it. It wasn't, as I said, I don't want to say it was an accident, but that was how it unfolded.

Nicola Wright (Curator, Exhibitions): Do we have any other questions? Otherwise maybe I'll pose one last question I just want to ask, related to the conversation you had before, but just thinking about some of the conversations this evening being facilitated by the work in the room, but also by your writing practice. I think that was how I was introduced to your work versus your writing actually, before the sculptural practice. I was wondering if you'd just say a few words about how your relationship to writing has changed or how it sits, how all those aspects perform with each other?

Caspar Heinemann: Yeah, I think it's... I definitely think about it all as a single project I'm doing – most of my writing at the moment is academic, and even that feels like part of the same project. I think partially, especially with the academic writing and the critical writing, but with all of it, in a way, it always feels like part of myself I have to exorcise in order to be able to make the work in this intuitive way, but they don't really understand because it's not a research-based practice in a way. It's this very… yeah, that's all happening. Then the work isn't really, in any way, a representation of that in any direct way. But I think that if I didn't do all of the writing, there'd be a temptation to feel like it did need to be, or that it needed to explain things in a more comprehensible way. Yeah, I like to think it's all there in the gaps between everything.

Nicola Wright (Curator, Exhibitions): Maybe then, if we pause there, we'll keep the gallery open a little bit longer if people feel like staying and spending more time with the work. Again, also please, please feel you can stay and have a drink and sit in the garden.

Most importantly, thank you so much to Caspar and Oreet for such a thoughtful, complex conversation.