Edwin Burdis, a former in-house artist for Domino Records, is the creative mind behind music videos for Arctic Monkeys, Rustin Man, and Alexis Taylor, as an artist he’s created some of the most interesting and thought-provoking exhibitions in the British contemporary art scene. Thomas Lonsdale got the chance to have a chat him...
Well, I’m working on a film at the moment, which is actually a film about Tom Rees, the lead singer of the band, Buzzard Buzzard Buzzard, after meeting him I was struck by the fact that he is a very entertaining young man. He’s not camera shy if anything he adores it. Obviously, there’s ego involved in that, but it’s not sycophantic. He’s really into people as well, he’ll talk to people. So, this film I’m working on at the moment which is basically all this documentary footage which we’re getting together. Do you know this film called Hail the new Puritan; check it out – and twenty thousand days on earth, which is about Nick Cave, and F for Fake, that’s Orson Welles’ best film in my opinion, they’re sort of like these documentaries, but they’re fictionalised, so there’s these fantastical moments, which is sort of what we’re going to do in this as well. We’re going to follow Tom talking to/interviewing practitioners in the south of Wales; Other musicians, artists, writers, actors, stylists, people that are just getting on with it. It will be his reactions to that, that learning process, whilst at the same time, he will also be going down memory lane. A lot of it is that I’m really into analogue effects… I’ll be building a fake studio, which is a model, so that it’d seem like there’s a landscape on paper… you’d be playing with scale and time, it's not linear...Do you think there’s a lot of similarities between your experiences?
No, because I didn’t really have a conventional upbringing, I didn’t really go to school, I went straight into making dance music and I was in bands and stuff. I think wanting to be famous and successful yes, definitely. But I lost that pretty quickly, whereas with Tom there is the joy of music, while at the same time he does very much want to be successful and famous.
Do you think space, like when you were living in New York and when you were living in Berlin, is important to you?
Yes and no; when I was in Berlin I managed to wangle a record deal and I had some money, and this was a time when you could rent an apartment in Kreuzberg for €60 a month, and I was doing something. I was working on an album, that was an absolute disaster, and just winging it, so I wasn’t involved in Berlin at all. Apart from the fascination with German contemporary culture I guess, and the history. The second world war and all of those things. I had quite a strong relationship with Germany actually, I had three different girlfriends that are from different parts of Germany that I stayed with as well. That sort of Central Europe; I know that place and I like that place. New York, that’s overload isn’t it, I just stepped into a film set basically. So I enjoyed that, got into no end of trouble. So I guess I’m saying that it doesn’t...
Well I guess there’s just the continuity of you existing in these different places?
Yeah, well you just get on with it, don’t you. Actual physical space is a big deal, and that’s another reason that I left London. I never thought that I would own a house, and I own a house now, and a Studio, like that was a dream, an idea that was never going to happen. That’s given me space, so a lot of the things that I’m doing at the moment wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t have moved to Wales and I hadn’t had the space, especially the videos. I got a creative Wales award, so they pay your wage for a year, and there’s no like ‘you have to do this, you have to do that’, you could even do nothing if you wanted to. The point was that you didn’t have to think about bills, rent, you could just move forward. Through that, I met Jonny at Domino Records, and he offered for me to be their creative director for two years. I could only do those things because I had that, that energy, that money let me concentrate on that and give it its whole worth rather than having to worry about practical stuff.
So do you find that lack of limitations, with digital stuff, quite freeing?
I was talking about this yesterday, with photoshop actually, and I’ve made music on the computer, and it’s the first time that I’m putting restrictions on it. It’s basically saying that this is the look that it’s going to have, and it’s staying like that. it’s only going to have these colours or it's going to be in black and white. Being a creative director, you have to be good at making decisions, and that is something that I’m good at, creatively. I am a bit sort of lost sometimes.
When you can do anything, limitations are very important, I suppose.
Yeah, very much so, and that’s why I love doing, and I’m being told I’m very good at, music videos. I’m told that this is the budget, these are the resources, this is the deadline; do it.
So do you find working with other people, with a tightly controlled budget and deadlines helps you to get things done, or do you prefer just the freedom of having a year to just think of things, or I suppose a combination of both?
Combination of both. That’s why we’re looking into funding, because you don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow and it sounds really bad but there is a lot of work coming in, and it's been really hard because haven’t made something in like a year. When you’re making work, you’ve got a show on. Like with my galleries, I put on a show like every two years, so there's lots of times for things to just stew and bubble and worry and panic and moments of joy and all of those things, where this is all happening very quickly. I’m looking at my table now and there’s like three different lists of things. I put down these bits of paper and I jot down things for different projects and it’s lots of stuff. They’re all very different, too.
Yes and no; when I was in Berlin I managed to wangle a record deal and I had some money, and this was a time when you could rent an apartment in Kreuzberg for €60 a month, and I was doing something. I was working on an album, that was an absolute disaster, and just winging it, so I wasn’t involved in Berlin at all. Apart from the fascination with German contemporary culture I guess, and the history. The second world war and all of those things. I had quite a strong relationship with Germany actually, I had three different girlfriends that are from different parts of Germany that I stayed with as well. That sort of Central Europe; I know that place and I like that place. New York, that’s overload isn’t it, I just stepped into a film set basically. So I enjoyed that, got into no end of trouble. So I guess I’m saying that it doesn’t...
Well I guess there’s just the continuity of you existing in these different places?
Yeah, well you just get on with it, don’t you. Actual physical space is a big deal, and that’s another reason that I left London. I never thought that I would own a house, and I own a house now, and a Studio, like that was a dream, an idea that was never going to happen. That’s given me space, so a lot of the things that I’m doing at the moment wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t have moved to Wales and I hadn’t had the space, especially the videos. I got a creative Wales award, so they pay your wage for a year, and there’s no like ‘you have to do this, you have to do that’, you could even do nothing if you wanted to. The point was that you didn’t have to think about bills, rent, you could just move forward. Through that, I met Jonny at Domino Records, and he offered for me to be their creative director for two years. I could only do those things because I had that, that energy, that money let me concentrate on that and give it its whole worth rather than having to worry about practical stuff.
Speaking of the records and stuff, what’s your favourite medium to work with? Do you find that the creative process is similar with painting or sculpture or music or video?
I see it all in one big lump. To go back to that question of what I’m working on, I’m working on three other videos at the moment and I’m going back to animation, or using my mark making and turning that into animation. I think I’m getting really off on that, that’s pretty mental. I feel like a boy again; not that I want to feel like a boy, but that you can just sit there all day and just draw. That is what’s happening at the moment and you’re just going on this journey. Like a lot of good stuff, it’s all about collaboration. If you’re working with a musician, then they’ve obviously made the sound, and having that conversation, and then working with the OP and getting the raw footage, and then you’re spending hours at a time drawing on a computer, which is so removed from sitting on my computer all day doing emails and admin, which I’ve been doing a lot of recently. Even if you’re sitting in front of a computer it’s your studio isn’t it, so I’m really enjoying that. And what I’m really enjoying about that is that the only thing I’m consuming is the computer, which was built, and power. There’s no waste. A lot of the work I’ve been making there’s a lot of waste and it was really getting me down, particularly with the materials I’m using like plywood and spray paint, there’s a lot of very toxic stuff that, I don’t know what you’re doing with it, in the end. A very small percentage of this work was being bought or going to a collection, it was sitting in a cupboard somewhere, so that was something I was very conscious of; getting away from that. So it means I can do even more of it because there isn’t like a huge footprint.
So do you find that lack of limitations, with digital stuff, quite freeing?
I was talking about this yesterday, with photoshop actually, and I’ve made music on the computer, and it’s the first time that I’m putting restrictions on it. It’s basically saying that this is the look that it’s going to have, and it’s staying like that. it’s only going to have these colours or it's going to be in black and white. Being a creative director, you have to be good at making decisions, and that is something that I’m good at, creatively. I am a bit sort of lost sometimes.
When you can do anything, limitations are very important, I suppose.
Yeah, very much so, and that’s why I love doing, and I’m being told I’m very good at, music videos. I’m told that this is the budget, these are the resources, this is the deadline; do it.
So do you find working with other people, with a tightly controlled budget and deadlines helps you to get things done, or do you prefer just the freedom of having a year to just think of things, or I suppose a combination of both?
Combination of both. That’s why we’re looking into funding, because you don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow and it sounds really bad but there is a lot of work coming in, and it's been really hard because haven’t made something in like a year. When you’re making work, you’ve got a show on. Like with my galleries, I put on a show like every two years, so there's lots of times for things to just stew and bubble and worry and panic and moments of joy and all of those things, where this is all happening very quickly. I’m looking at my table now and there’s like three different lists of things. I put down these bits of paper and I jot down things for different projects and it’s lots of stuff. They’re all very different, too.
Do you like being busy?
I just naturally am, creatively, I’m not very good at organising… my life! But yeah, I have to have these moments where I say that I’m going to take two days off and actually do nothing. Otherwise, I do just work all day into the night, no weekends. There are these periods when I’m not even going to pick up a pencil, I wouldn’t say they’re getting more frequent, but they are getting more disciplined as I get older. I’ve got to do that; I’ve got to do nothing. Read a book, watch some films, or go walking.
Well I suppose in South Wales there are lots of nice places to go?
Yeah, we live half way up a mountain and it’s a forty-minute walk into town...
That forces you to take the space to breathe, whereas in London you might not have had that.
Yeah I mean in London, London… I mean for the last ten years I lived like a hermit in London, I wasn’t involved in anything really, not even going out of the door. And I used to love walking London, that’s what you did right? You’d walk those streets and look at things but it got to that point where… London’s not a very creative place anymore, not for me anyway. It’s a playground for the rich or you’re very poor. I think my generation were the last where, because in London everything’s sewn up, everything’s a commodity. Friends of mine used to have a warehouse in the Oval space, next to Broadway market, and we used to live in a canal house there... It’s all knocked down now. I think that’s one of the last places where you could literally walk into a space and decide to just do something there, and not think about money. It was actually about the process. I’m not being disrespectful to anyone, but when you’ve only got people coming from one particular background, where’s the rub?
So you think that creative tension is important?
Yeah, I grew up on a council estate in a single parent family, and the people who I’ve worked with have come from all backgrounds and because of that there is that tension, the third brain happens. If I just hung out with the people that I grew up with, no disrespect, but I probably would have ended up in jail.
Artist. I know exactly what you’re talking about, I’m not being flippant, but there are different times and places when I’ll say I’m a creative director. Either artist or creative director, those are the only labels I’d give myself. Seven years old, I said I would be an artist
Interview by Thomas Lonsdale
That forces you to take the space to breathe, whereas in London you might not have had that.
Yeah I mean in London, London… I mean for the last ten years I lived like a hermit in London, I wasn’t involved in anything really, not even going out of the door. And I used to love walking London, that’s what you did right? You’d walk those streets and look at things but it got to that point where… London’s not a very creative place anymore, not for me anyway. It’s a playground for the rich or you’re very poor. I think my generation were the last where, because in London everything’s sewn up, everything’s a commodity. Friends of mine used to have a warehouse in the Oval space, next to Broadway market, and we used to live in a canal house there... It’s all knocked down now. I think that’s one of the last places where you could literally walk into a space and decide to just do something there, and not think about money. It was actually about the process. I’m not being disrespectful to anyone, but when you’ve only got people coming from one particular background, where’s the rub?
So you think that creative tension is important?
Yeah, I grew up on a council estate in a single parent family, and the people who I’ve worked with have come from all backgrounds and because of that there is that tension, the third brain happens. If I just hung out with the people that I grew up with, no disrespect, but I probably would have ended up in jail.
I’m kind of interested to know; people place a lot of importance on categories and you work in so many different mediums and styles, how would you define yourself? What defines your body of work?
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