Plinth

When you first approached this project, did you ever feel overwhelmed by the huge collection of objects at The Soane Museum? I certainly felt that way.

Yes, I’ve heard of other people having the same reaction. Friends came to see us at the studio, and we advised them to go to The Soane Museum. They emailed us a couple of days later to say, “What can you do in that place, that coral reef?” They saw it as a kind of encrustation.

Perhaps that’s why some of your extraordinary found pieces work so well here, I’m thinking of The Burnt Madonna (a statue of St Theresa of the Roses rescued from a Church in Suffolk) and Wind Dried Whippet (a desiccated whippet bought on Brick Lane for £4)

They are both here. There’s that kind of thread to our work. There’s a work downstairs in the kitchen called Traces of Living, that we made in 1986 and we’ve reconfigured it for this exhibition, to make it work in the kitchen. So, there’s both things going on – there’s the pristine white furniture structures, but also these traces of real life.

Having your work here amongst the eighteenth century pieces helps to provide a focus.

I hope there’s a kind of dialogue between the old and new. By transforming your surroundings, it becomes who you are, and your identity is marked out in that sense and we’ve always used where we live and where we work, as extensions of ourselves in that way.

Exhibition curator Owen Hopkins points out that your house in Whitechapel was built in the same year as the Soane Museum, in 1792.

The brickwork has a similar colour and the mortar and pointing of Soane, are the same as on our Whitechapel street. Soane was the son of a bricklayer; he came from a very modest background himself. Bricks, whether they are red or yellow, are quite fundamental to London.

When I wrote about your Whitechapel home for a new book on London, I couldn’t believe how much work you had done on the house – from pouring concrete, to installing electrics and drilling into walls. Have you taken the same approach here?

No, we’re not allowed to drill anything here.

I went to Pitzhanger Manor (Soane’s country house in Walpole Park, in Ealing) last year for the first time, I hadn’t realised it was also one of Soane’s very first jobs, as a young teenage apprentice architect working on an extension here. As you know, he then went back and bought the house in 1800, hoping his sons would carry on the family practice – but they both rejected this idea…

It’s difficult if you start forcing things on people, then they react and do the opposite, you can encourage people but….

Can you tell me more about your research process during the past two-and-half years preparing for the exhibition?

We’ve had many visits here, probably about forty visits. Very intensely involved in the narrative and things developing quite naturally, as we explored the house and learnt more about Soane. There’s a lot of information, so we had to think about the context and what new works to place here. Travel is a core theme.

As we came and went, we became aware of certain kind of connections and underlying sympathies between our work and this building. We’ve selected from four decades of work, so there are some things that we made in the past that we thought would work well here, and then other cases, where we thought, no we’ll make a new piece for that, so we made this new work here (Grand Tour, 2020) with rows of chairs. I think you’re probably aware that we’ve made other works with rows of chairs in the past, and we thought this was a coincidence, but we realise now that we were subliminally influenced by Soane’s rows of chairs.

Because these chairs were in a row, they were aesthetic objects for him, not to be sat on. For him to do that was quite a radical thing.

What was your relationship to Soane and the Grand Tour?

When we were students our first travels were to Europe, as well. We did our first exhibitors in cologne and Frankfurt and Italy, so we felt a connection there, with how our work evolved from the beginning.

Tell me about your approach to domestic spaces.

Everything starts in the kitchen! (laughs) Bizarrely you begin your journey here through the kitchen. It’s ironic that this is the building that remains, that it’s still here and that people visit, as this building was his life as well. He came from very modest beginnings and he went up in the world because his wife had money, in a way it was a step up for him, so that he could expand his practice and to take on more ambitious projects

Chloe was saying that he used to walk to Pitzhanger Manor from here

Did he really? How long did that take?

This is the story; Pitzhanger is 8 miles from here (from Lincolns Inn Fields to Ealing) so he used to get up early, go fishing in his lake and catch some dinner…

Yes! He cooked his own fish, didn’t he? What kind of fish would they be? Perch or carp – muddy ones that I don’t particularly like (laughs)