>Sam Taylor Wood : Early Works

Marcelo Spinelli: You left Goldsmiths' before you finished?

Sam Taylor Wood: No, no. I finished. And then I went to work at Covent Garden Opera House; and I went to work in the wardrobe department. I didn't apply for the job, I just phoned up and it so happened that someone had just left. But it was in the male wardrobe department and they'd never had a woman work in there and they didn't want one, but they'd had no-one else apply for the job so they literally said well, we'll put up with you until a man applies for the job. So again, it was like being in this funny, wrong environment. But it was just brilliant.

MS: But they were opera people...

STW: It was all opera, but it was a really intense job. You had to be there at 9 o'clock in the morning; everybody had to arrive at 9 o'clock in the morning and the whole Opera House has breakfast together: you all go downstairs at 9 o'clock, and you all sit around having breakfast together. So it's like this bonding thing in the morning. And then you work right through until about 11.30/midnight, so it's a really, really long day - and that was six days a week so it was really, really intense.

You got to know all the productions and everything you were doing; and you had to know all the opera singers and stars and what they were wearing, and make sure that they had the right things. And just being in that environment, which was so totally different and so flamboyant and theatrical, - and you know backstage was almost more theatrical than front of house - it was just incredible really. Well, it was full of people who'd been working there since they were fifteen or sixteen, you know years and years ago; and they started working there as a teaboy or a dresser - and this was fifty years later and they're still there. And you imagine, you're working that intense amount of time in such a theatrical environment.

Everything is camped up, everything is kind of hammed up. And that's their world. And it becomes the strangest, strangest world. And there was a group of three of us who worked in the men's wardrobe, and it was.. Yeah, good times. But anyway it was dealing with stars as well, you know, taking them to the stage and watching them perform, and being involved in that atmosphere, and it was completely over the top. And trying at the same time to continue making my work, which was almost like the antithesis of that; you know, cool, calm, collected thought. And manufacturing objects in a very rigorous way. And I'd go to work in my studio and think, what the hell am I doing?

MS: You mean it had nothing to do with what you were actually experiencing, but you were seeing it as being quite a separate thing - the work you were doing at the Opera House - but then suddenly you began to think this is actually what I am experiencing.

STW: I would go to work there, and I'd just be completely over-excited the whole time. And I'd go to my studio on my days off and think, this is so boring. What am I doing? And just thinking that it had nothing to do with what I was actually thinking. So that's when I started slowly to change my work. But I was still not ready to think about it - or not willing to. Look what I was doing! I was making these very minimal boxes with boxing ring-type ropes around, and also those barriers that stop people touching art. It was all very caught up in that.

MS: I see what you mean now. But maybe this is already the influence of being in the opera house?

STW: Yes. It's already creeping through.

MS: So this is the Show Hide Show exhibition [at the Anderson O'Day Gallery, 1991] ?

STW: That was the first thing. After that I wasn't making so much work; and then after that, the next show I made was at the Clove Gallery - Clove Two. That was a funny show. I made reconstructions of photographs of Jackson Pollock at work. They were basically pictures by Hans Namuth, the classic ones of Pollock splashing his paints around. I re-did the photograph with me in tight navy blue jeans, big cowboy boots and tight white T-shirt, living out that same thing. But on the floor were very rigorously hand-painted camouflage paintings. So there was a kind of contradiction in what you saw as the activity and in the stillness of what was going on in these paintings.

MS: Was this the first time that you had worked with photography?

STW: Yes.

MS: Where did that come from, that idea of working with photography?

STW: I stopped making work for about a year, and then I started thinking more about what I was interested in, and things just started projecting themselves as images... It didn't feel right, the whole idea of making these very anonymous objects. It didn't work with how I was thinking. Especially when I was subjected to this whole theatrical experience, this big stage presence. Using photography just seemed the right way to be able to stage those environments and to still them. So.., that was that. And after that, I still took more time making; I think another year elapsed before I started to really kick off making serious work.

I left the Opera House and I went to work in this other job which was a complete nightmare. It was working in this nightclub at Camden Palace. Do you know the Camden Palace? The seediest, most hellish nightclub in the world. And within the first day of working there, because I could string a sentence together, they made me manager. And so I became manager of Camden Palace and, basically, they made me manager 'cause they were all stealing all the money. The overall managers were stealing money, but I was accountable for it because I was doing all the accounts. So I'd be there after the nightclub closed and I'd be trying to do the accounts, not having a clue what I was doing, and I'd add the money up and there would be, like, £1000 missing.

MS: Thinking you had the coolest job going!

STW: Yes. Thinking I was totally Miss Hip, running the seediest club in town. These great filmic ideas coming through...

MS: Like Mary Tyler Moore.

STW: Yes, exactly. So anyway I was working there and the bouncers on the door said to me, you've taken on a really serious job. One of the bouncers was a bit protective, and he said, 'you know you are in deep shit, basically, and we are your only friends. When it comes down to it, just remember we are your only friends'. And I didn't really understand what he was getting at, and he said, you know, 'if ever, love, you're in any trouble just come to me', and all this sort of stuff. And I was thinking, God this is a bit heavy! And then it got worse and worse. Anyway, the atmosphere got heavier and heavier; I was getting more and more scared. I was getting deeper into shit and I was there, again, five or six nights a week 'til six o'clock in the morning, trying to find all this missing money. Also I was sitting on the door during the evening taking the money coming in, because they'd sacked lots of people, and so I was in control even more; and so,... Oh it was just so awful!

MS: So you'd left the Opera by then?

STW: I'd left the Opera. There had been a sort of year between the Opera and this job. I'd changed quite a lot in my life at the time and this was my sort of big strike for independence and a new life. But the whole thing completely backfired and I was up shit creek without a paddle. One of the bouncers just came to me and said, you've got to leave. I was almost close to nervous breakdown anyway. And I said, why? And he said, there's going to be an armed robbery and I think you should leave. So I just came home and I sent my keys back.

MS: They were going to do the robbery to cover up the money that had... ?

STW: Yes. And I'd have just been knocked out of the way. And all that kind of stuff.... But these three guys were really significant in my life at the time. They were basically meat and muscle, but they were bouncers of the old school. They'd been there about fifteen years and I'd seen them reduce people to mincemeat a few times. One of them was ex-SAS. So I made these photographs of them which were the three of them in the Tate Gallery in front of five different paintings.

MS: That was one of the pieces that you showed at Wonderful Life at the Lisson.

STW: Yes. And that was almost my first break into a way of working that I felt happy with. So I made these photographs, which were very much how I was thinking and feeling at the time, which were these figures protecting me and behind them were these big paintings. I had them standing in front of a Franz Kline. And not just paintings from one era or another, but paintings right across the board. So I had something by Kline, and something by Rothko, and something by Lord Leighton, and Whistler.

MS: But was it also a way that you managed to merge both sides of your life, somehow, for the first time? You've got all these dramatic real life experiences and then there's all this other stuff.

STW: Yes, exactly. But of course, in one sense that doesn't really come over. You know, I don't think it was a complete success in the work because the work was almost too personal, so when you see the work it looks very stilted, very portrait-style. Shall I show you?

MS: Oh yes. I didn't realise they were bouncers when I saw them. Because they look like corporate men, don't they? Sort of Saatchi and Saatchi, or something, because they are in front of paintings, of course; and the way they are dressed.

STW: Exactly. Except for the one in the middle is wearing lead weighted leather gloves. Not the sort of thing that corporate men wear.

MS: Oh, I don't know!

STW: And the one on the right, he phoned me recently..

MS: He's the one in front of a Kline picture.

STW: Yeah. But the one on the right, the smaller of the three, he was the most psychopathic, and he phoned one day and said could he come and see these photographs because he hadn't seen them (and the other two had seen them), and I said, yeah sure, and he didn't turn up. He was supposed to come and meet me here, and I thought that was strange because these men were very hot on being "gen'lemen", you know, show a lady a nice time, and be nice. Anyway, he didn't show up and I thought it was really weird. And then three days later he called and said, I'm really sorry I didn't show up but I'm up on a murder charge at the moment, but the minute it's over I'll pop round! Oh, yeah, great.. I don't know what's happened to him. Anyway, enough of the anecdotes. All this work was very anecdotal and very connected to my life then.

MS: Yes. So what year are these pieces from?

STW: 1993.