Peter Georgallou is a fascinating artist currently occupying the CHARLIE SMITH london gallery. This name should ring a bell, as it is ran by Zavier Ellis – a keen MurdockMan who we’ve had the pleasure of interviewing before.
Peter recently popped into our Shoreditch branch for a haircut and beard trim with Gwen. As he arrives, bicycle polo stick in hand, he is instantly strikes curiosity. After his appointment we sit down and attempt to get to grips with what this compelling artist is all about. Turns out, rather a lot…
You went to Kingston University and studied Fine Art, how was that experience?
Really great. I think I caught the end of university being really fun. I really enjoyed it. I made some really good friends who I still speak to.
Is going to university something that you would recommend to fellow young artists aspiring to grow into the industry?
Yeah definitely. I think because Kingston’s not a very prestigious university, I got much better teaching and much better service and really great facilities. Also more space because it’s not in central London. It’s a good place to be at, but not as good a place to have been, if that makes sense?
I feel that because I went to the Royal College afterwards and that was the opposite. It was a horrible place to be but a really great place to have been… It was such a pressure cooker. I don’t think I made as much work that I’m happy with there as I did at Kingston.
Tell us about some of your exhibition highlights so far.
I had a few shows in Spain. I’ve also got a show in Cyprus at the moment on top of a mountain, in a monastery. No one’s going to see it, but I sort of love that.
How on earth does something like that come about?
I did a work exchange with an artist in Cyprus who has a museum, on a mountain, in a monastery… so that’s on for the next two years there. They don’t change the show very often. My work in Spain was also really different because I really enjoyed working there. I felt much freer.
Is that due to the general environment?
Partly the environment but partly because you essentially fall out of the sky, land somewhere and you can do what you like. No one knows what you do, who you are, where you come from - they have no social context of what you are which is really nice. You can just do anything and it’s a lot less tainted by your personality or anything else, so it’s quite liberating. I like the idea of doing lots of international shows. I did a show in Holland recently, that I really liked because I feel like my art doesn’t work as well in London as it does abroad. It’s not very ‘London work’.
With that in mind, do you feel that you come at things with a more ‘continental’ approach?
I just don’t really feel a part of the London art scene at all. And that’s a bit annoying when I’m in London. When you go to other countries you’re just an artist and you don’t have to be part of a scene, it’s quite nice.
You keep a very low-key online presence. Is there a specific reason for that?
I just don’t like it. I think there’s so much value in conversation, and online presence kills that. When Zavier called me about the show that’s on at the moment at Charlie Smith, he was just like ‘what do you do? I don’t really know.’ We had to have a conversation about it and that’s really lovely. You meet some nice people. I think I probably get less work because of that, but I can also make what I don’t like disappear. It’s not there forever. Artsadmin contacted me about maybe putting forward a proposal for a project and again, it was really great. We had to go and have coffee. I basically live in a coffee shop, and it’s great.
You’ve gone through the transition from being a student to a professional artist, how smooth a challenge was that? Do you feel that you’ve accomplished it now?
I feel like I’m definitely moving in the right direction. I’m getting enough work. I’d like to get more work, and bigger work. At the moment I’m getting enough though, which I’ve never really had before. It wasn’t a smooth transition at all. My last month at the Royal College was a bit of a car crash and so I spent the summer just putting my head back together and then I guess from that point it sort of came around. Every exhibition I’ve had and every bit of work that I’ve had displayed has been achieved through someone nice who I’ve bumped in to and had a chat with and thought ‘oh yeah we can work together’.
What was it about your work that enticed Zavier? And what’s currently on display at CHARLIE SMITH london?
I think the work that Zavier saw of mine that lead him to contact me was a film I made. It wasn’t really a documentary; it was like recreating a story from my life, or the story of my life. I actually live in Surrey and commute into London by bike, which is a lot of effort. It’s nice, I used to do a lot of racing so I’m fit enough to do it, but fifty miles a day gets wearing. It was a film about cycling from my house to my friend Jessica Charleston’s house for her birthday party. I had to pick up a present for her and lots of things happened along the way. Mainly, I stop at a petrol station and buy some petrol, but because I’m in a bit of a rush and I’m quite disorganised, I just forget to pay. The guy who runs the station is an evil wizard who chases me and I have to escape by throwing a piano in a river and sail away on it. When eventually I do get to Jessica Charleston’s birthday party, I’ve broken her present, lost my bike, got covered in mud and everyone is asleep because I get there so late. Then I just have to go home… It really does feel like the story of my life – such an epic failure, but really quite satisfying.
The Royal College built this new Dyson building, which was this really brutalist architecture. There was this bit of derelict land behind it because they hadn’t finished building it by the final degree show. I put up this really small sort of yurt bowing down to this massive, brutal architecture. It was full of canaries, just flying around with a 70-inch plasma screen inside showing this film and that’s the work Zavier saw. (You can view a snippet of the film here).
It’s quite a self-involved practice, but I think every artist has to be self-involved. I do feel like my practice is really genuine, it’s just things that interest me and maybe represent the story of lots of people’s lives. I guess what my practice is, is finding the extraordinary in the ordinary. Like of course, the petrol station doesn’t have a magic wizard running it and bicycles don’t fall out of the sky. But maybe they do you know! That’s where I want to live so I’m building that for myself and that’s the kind of art that makes me really happy.
I have a friend – Phil Hinn, who just does funny crayon drawings of children mixed with really beautiful bits of Victorian etching and has them printed on teapots. I love his practice because it just makes me happy. It’s just like seeing the really ordinary world and finding a childish extraordinary narrative, a mythology, and a fairytale that you can live in inside of that. It’s just building your own matrix. It’s fun!
In terms of what’s going on at CHARLIE SMITH london right now, what can people see and expect?
I built a pedal-powered loom, and the idea is that at some point I’m going to weave tweed with it. I invented a new material, which I hope will one day phase out carbon fibre called high-density tweed composite. So the loom is actually not finished yet. It’s not functioning at the moment, but the structure is there. It will be a machine for building high-density tweed composite that you can build things like racecars out of. The reason for that is because in this country we’ve got a massive excess of wool, but the wool we have you can’t use for jumpers because it’s too coarse and it’s too expensive to handle, but it costs nothing in comparison to carbon fibre. Burning wool is really expensive and that’s how people get rid of it. Because it doesn’t hold a flame you have to incinerate it. So I’m hoping that maybe some things that carbon fibre is used for, high-density tweed composite can be used for instead. It would give a really good economic boost to the country. Good for the world, good for everyone.
How do you come to create something like that?
So I’m super-fascinated with this stuff (points to what he’s wearing). This is woven by Guy Hills and he’s got a company called Dashing Tweeds, who make technical tweed. I was looking at different ways to use wool and I was really inspired by Guy’s tweed. I got some samples off him, played around and thought of different ways I could use the tweed. He’s a very good friend’s brother who’s an architect as well and so I’ve been working on a show with him and I just like this idea of tweed being this architectural material. Wool’s used in building lots, just not in this way. The biggest uses of carbon fibre is skyscrapers and buildings, they have to be really lightweight structures to avoiding sinking into the ground. I quite like the idea of it being used in buildings.
I’ve also worked on a bunch of farms. I used to work for a charity called the Otesha Project who are an environmental charity. I think their views are a bit extreme. I mean they’re all vegan and I think that’s a pretty extreme view. I liked a lot of what they did but I don’t think you have to be an extremist to think about the way that the countryside works and the way that the world works. I think instead of thinking ‘oh these structures are awful, we’ll go against them’, you should find ways of making the world better within the structures that exist. I think that’s my sort of push to try and make the world a little bit nicer, just by making some nice tweed.
What can people expect from the exhibition itself? Is the loom in the gallery?
Yeah, the loom is in the gallery as well as a tall bike, which is wedged between the floor and the ceiling. I built the bike to be the exact size of the gallery and then when you pump the tires up, it just wedges itself in and can’t come out. I quite like that as a little nod to something architectural, but that bike will be powering the loom once it’s all connected up.
It sounds quite interactive?
No, I totally wanted the opposite of that because stringing up a loom takes flipping forever and if people are messing around on it, it’s all going to get broken. This is the first show I’ve had where I’ve had the sense to just make the object look like the object, but not work. It’s going to work at some point but for exhibitions purposes it can just not.
Has this been your main focus for a while then? And what else can we expect to see from you in the near future?
It has been for a while; I’ve got a few projects on the go. I’ve got my first high-density tweed composite prototype that I’m going to use to try and make enough money to pattern the material. The first object that I’m making is a rim for bicycle wheel. It’s a really good way to show a lot of different strengths of the material, it needs rigidity but also torsion strength because it’s under a lot of stress in a lot of different directions. I think that’s a good start. I’ve been working with a mould maker to build wheels of high-density tweed composite.
I’m also working on something with Fortnum & Mason which is a really big nice project; I’m casting lots of bronze for it. There are a few bits and pieces coming up in Utrecht and Nijmegen in Holland. I love Holland; it’s really fun and a good place to buy clothes. Best flea markets ever.
It’s clear that your art comes from the everyday things that you do. Bike polo is certainly an extremely interesting hobby to have, so what else keeps you occupied?
I think that was my realisation of this year. The three P’s – polo, partying and planning. I’m happier if I do those three things more. My quality of life improves… No, I’m a bit of a lunatic I guess in the things that I do. I don’t really sleep very much ever, I never really have. I try to get jobs doing strange things. I’ve done quite a lot of farming. I’ve done quite a lot of cataloguing of antiques. I used to be the guy who holds stuff up at the front of auctions – that’s quite silly. I don’t know. I feel like the big project is to just ‘get it’. We’re all here right? I think the more angles you can come at getting it, the better. So I just try and do as much as I can, even if it’s really boring. It’s got to be constructive; you can’t just be doing something and not thinking about what you’re doing. I think that’s quite a way to gain a good general overview of what’s going on. My dad owns a chip shop, I’ve worked there quite a lot and that was fun. I mean working with your Dad is always going to be mental but that’s fine. I quite want to work on an oilrig maybe too. I think oil is really horrible, but maybe I just need to work on a rig for a bit. I haven’t done that yet. What do the people that work on them do? What do they think? Imagine being on an oilrig. You’d just be on there with a bunch of men, churning out oil. It’s like pure evil basically.
Peter’s show at CHARLIE SMITH london ends Saturday 16th February