Meeting Them Indoors

Carl Clerkin, William Warren and Gitta Gschwendtner, the trio behind this Autumn's wackiest design show, Them Indoors, talk to Fiona Sibley about their lifelong addiction to objects

 

 

Visitors to the Geffrye Museum this autumn will stumble across the perverse genius of Carl Clerkin, William Warren and Gitta Gschwendtner. The trio, described by Lesley Jackson as "a dream team of YBDs" has created Them Indoors, an installation of three room sets filled with objects brimming with meaning. The effect is an intended celebration of our sentimental attachment to possessions.

I meet the trio in their studio in east London, where Carl Clerkin takes our first step as narrator. "What goes through all our work is that we’re interested in the connection between people and objects. Our work tries somehow to make that connection, through storytelling or questioning convention."

"Our ideas are driven by the necessity to provoke something from the user," adds Gitta Gschwendtner. "Everyone uses objects slightly differently and that’s our point. It is about personality and what you do with things and that’s also where the narrative aspect of our work comes in."

 

"Most of us make stuff that hopefully will last for a hundred years and become loved objects and the Geffrye Museum is all about that home idea, says William. "It’s completely about emotional connections to furniture."

As Carl explains: "I’ve got a chair that’s going in because I when I bought it from Oxfam it was a decoy so that I didn’t have to speak to someone I didn’t want to, which feels like part of that chair's history for me now. It’s also a lovely chair which cost £3.95."

For Carl, William and Gitta this idea that our worldly possessions are part of a Hans Christian Andersen world of personal associations and fragments of memory is inspiring. To prove it, they once did a pilot for a BBC show in which they suggested that every time you brought a broom you should pantomime-horse with it all the way home to forge a personal connection. Tragically the commissioners didn't go for it. "We were talking about this connection with objects but things genuinely happen like that – you think of a cupboard as the thing you fell over as a kid and got a scar on your head."

 

Their room settings will display a mixture of new products, found objects and possessions they have borrowed from their own homes and those of friends and relatives. William’s room contains one of his guitars (he keeps one in every room of his house, even the toilet) while Carl's contains a few loaded references to gifts from his mother-in-law.

 

 

 

What sets their work apart from other works that use wit to challenge convention is a consistently genuine warmth at the heart of their experimentation. But are these three designers – by trade bewitched by objects - typical of a wider attitude to possessions?

"Hopefully it’s universal," says William. "That’s why we’re pushing this obsession of ours, because everybody has got those objects stored up inside them that they feel associated with. It’s not nice to talk about people being made up of possessions, but everybody has a little of that. Objects talk a lot about what you’re like and what you do and how you live."

"You’re very picky about who you live with and that’s the way I look at objects," adds Carl. "They’re your friends."

 

 

Through the Keyhole
Them Indoors dish the dirt on each other's chosen set of domestic habits.

 

Gitta on Carl: Carl’s is the most nostalgic. It looks at friends and family and things that he loves and recreates it almost like a dream home. Your dream home is all the things you admire about other people’s homes - not in an aspirational way but like his nan’s old tea set that he sees is special.

Carl on William: William’s is about objects that tell stories and most of the stories are related to the home. That could be through familiarity, or just about owning stuff or about the way things are used.

William on Gitta: Carl and I are working with familiar things but Gitta’s is about things that are familiar but also unusual. Her room’s not going to be a home that she could live in but about things being slightly different, like the scale being out and everything looking a bit odd. A bit uncanny.

Carl on Gitta: She’s weird basically.

 

Them Indoors opens at the Geffrye Museum on 23 September 2004 and runs until 16 January 2005. Free admission
136 Kingsland Road, Shoreditch, London E2 8EA
www.geffrye-museum.org.uk

 

 

Images from top: Them Indoors, photographed by Brenna Jensen, August 2004.

Bucket Stool by Carl Clerkin

Drunk wine glasses by William Warren

Ghost Lights by Gitta Gschwendtner