In the first of a series in which ‘Cornerstone’ highlights fresh creative talents – painters, designers, photographers, writers –whose work is in some way inspired by historic architecture, the artist and illustrator Ed Kluz talks about creating new art from old buildings.


Interview by Naomi Marks


Summoningspirit from the stone


You state in your online biography that you seek “the extraordinary, the lost and the overlooked”. What do you mean by this? I’minterested in neglect, in things that have fallen out of use. For me – and for a lot of the artists that have inspiredme, like John Piper, Graham Sutherland, Samuel Palmer John Craxton, Barbara Jones – there’s a fascination with the idea of ruin. It’s at the core of English romanticism – a response to the absence or loss of


82 Cornerstone, Vol 32, No 3 2011


something. Old buildings by their very nature are full of absences. I’m not solely interested in buildings as objects, but rather as palimpsests, as layers of history and memory, and I’m interested in how history forms how we live now, and how it underpins our understanding of ourselves. Earlier this year I spent a week in


Scotland working on a new series of pieces for a solo show, “The Drawing Room”, at the Scottish Gallery in Edinburgh. I visited places like


Mavisbank House. This is a fantastic, early 18th-century Adambuilding; it has perfect, doll’s house proportions, but it’s in a severe state of decay. However, it was exquisite in its decay – what John Piper calls pleasing decay. The fact that the beautiful pediments, and heavily carved stones were cracked and crumbling away forms a visualmetaphor for our own mortality. We expect these buildings to last longer than us, but eventually everything returns to earth.


This notion sits at the core of my work.


Where did your interest in these buildings stem from? My parents were always interested in history, and I was taken round countless castles and country houses when I was little. My father also grew up in a small country house, Kingsley House in Barnack, Northamptonshire. It was in a terrible state but had a Tudor wing, an 18th-century wing and a Gothic wing; it had an Adam panelled


JOHN LAWRENCE


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