Adam Chodzko

For the 30th anniversary of Awards for Artists, we interviewed 12 previous recipients in conversation with Lilli Geissendorfer. 
Adam Chodzko
Adam Chodzko. Photo credit: Richard Boll

The Award from 20+ years ago does keep shaping my reality now.”

22 years after he received one of Paul Hamlyn Foundation’s Awards for Artists, Adam Chodzko is reflecting on the complex ripples of the Award through his life and career. In his late 30s at the time, he’s gone on to generate an extraordinary range of work, making use of a wide range of media, practices and materials, deeply concerned with how we see each other and grappling with the spaces in between our communications.

He’s Zooming in from Whitstable in Kent, where he moved from South London around the same time as he received the Award. He is thinking of moving again, now his children are growing up and away, raising the spectre of leaving behind a Chodzko-shaped gap in the local arts scene. He has created not only a huge body of work there, but also been an integral part of projects and institutions across the county for the past two decades. 

Chodzko’s practice takes place both in galleries and non-art’ public sites beyond it. His most recent work has taken him from Blackburn with Ghost (2010 – ongoing), a socially engaged project involving a beautifully designed and crafted kayak as sculpture, ferrying passengers to the island of the dead’, to Kuala Lumpur for a major solo show But as we looked it suddenly began to change. Last year, he created a free digital tool for residents of the Isle of Sheppey (and anyone curious elsewhere) that uses generative AI to translate people’s dream descriptions into visual animations, creating a collective dream cloud. It’s a project he is now exploring further in a practice-based PhD at Leeds School of Arts at Leeds Beckett University.

Sheppey’s Dream Ecology, 2023.

Impact of the Award

Chodzko is clear that the Award supported him through a range of milestones in his life and practice that echo down the years. The Award came just after my first son was born, with all the amazing and challenging changes that parenting brings to the continuation of practising as an artist. It eased a lot of the anxiety about how to manage family, art, time, money. Which is a great gift for a new child; a slightly less anxious parent!”

The fact the Award could be spent on creating domestic and economic stability was critical: It made it financially possible to move out of London and get a deposit on a home. I think the stability this provided materially, psychologically, has had a huge impact in shaping the decades that followed. I’d never received that amount of money before, or since, so yes, it was definitely life changing.”

However, he recognises the status and respect attached to the Award as equally significant, but more difficult to see: I think receiving the Award holds some power, or some magic,’.” It’s a sign of assurance, a seal of approval or quality control’: Being embedded somewhere or other in a press release, on a subtle level [it] allows me to continue to take risks in what I make as an artist.” Without the Award acting as a kind of trust, or reminder, not to compromise, he’d likely be making nice, sellable knick-knacks for art fairs.” 

Becoming a father has had less attention than motherhood in artists’ lives, and to hear Chodkzo’s take on how it affected his artistic practice is fascinating. Right at the start there was this radical change in the amount of time and attention I had – probably caused by sleep deprivation – and I just had to start working in a far more intuitive way. Before my sons were born I had time to think through every option, for whatever art project I was working on. But now I suddenly only had 2–3 hours a day free to make work. So, I had to act without thinking. I thought this ability might last forever and was quite euphoric: I’ve found this whole new way of working!’”

He’s philosophical about the impossible challenge of sharing parenting so as not to disadvantage either partner’s career, rigorously dividing time, so that everything was completely equal, except, of course, spending time together.” He reflects that gender inequality is deeply rooted in the wider norms of the art world and artists’ uneven trajectories, the inability to say no’ to opportunities when offered and the economic precarity of artists’ livelihoods. It makes successfully combining an artistic practice, children and partnership the exception rather than the rule. 

Today, Chodzko is on top of recent research and analysis into artists’ livelihoods. He’s particularly disillusioned by the dire situation of a tiny percentage of artists who do commercially really well, and none of that is put back into the system, and then everyone else has to struggle, and struggle against each other.” This, and the mythology that unpaid opportunities will somehow lead to financial success by other means, is what he fears the next generation are up against. 

He’s increasingly concerned by the disparity between the commercial art world and those working outside it. 

There’s so few awards, like PHF’s Awards for Artists, that are able to overlook the art market or current fashions, and instead prioritise the quality of artistic practice and actually take the artwork seriously.”

One of the things I was told about the Award was that Jane (Hamlyn, Chair of PHF and Chair of the Visual Arts judging panel for the Awards) always asks but will it make a difference?’, will it allow their practice to mature and expand’?” For Chodzko, it’s this fundamental commitment to the art that makes the Awards what it is.

The arts and education

Chodzko’s perspective on the changing value placed by society on the arts, artists and arts education is both wide-ranging and specific, especially in relation to academia, having both taught extensively, including leading the Fine Art BA at University of Kent, and now returning as a PhD student himself. He paints a devastating picture of what’s happening behind news stories in higher education: The narrow-minded ideological prioritising of STEM subjects in education is having devastating consequences. When I arrived in Kent in 2001 you could study art at University of the Creative Arts (UCA) with its three sites (Canterbury, Rochester and Maidstone), the University of Kent, and Canterbury Christ Church University. In 2024 there is just one ailing fine art’ course left at UCA Canterbury. This project’ is killing off decades of progress towards equality, diversity and inclusivity in arts education.” He reflects on how brilliant it is to see greater acknowledgement of things like structural racism, and the need to continue to address discrimination and injustice, and innovate to improve the sector for everyone. 

Yet hope is also easy to find. He sees hope in the recent campaigns for fair pay, like FRANK, and the fact that despite comparatively terrible times artists are still somehow making astonishing new work.” He thinks deeply about what might improve things, suggesting that, for those who are sceptical about the importance of art, what’s needed now is some really good neuroscience that says looking at art is good for you.” He points out that we have good evidence that being creative is good for you (“anyone can make a potato print and feel a bit better”), but there needs to be evidence that shows that developing and deepening a craft brings deeper rewards both for the creator, and the audience. He’d also like to see different economic cases put forward: Prove that it’s cheaper for people to become artists, or make art, than to allow terrible mental health problems across society.” 

Because, 2013. Installation at Tate Britain.

Chodzko’s practice appears eclectic, yet he insists he’s still playing with the same questions he was in 2002. I’m always thinking I’m going to do this very different thing now but underneath it’s always the same work. I have to have a relationship with it that is new each time; I need to take a certain amount of risk, so I can get lost in it, but really, it comes back to the same questions.” 

If fundamental questions lie deep at the heart of his practice, there is also a deep desire to connect and reflect with his audiences. I’m always asking myself what can an art object be’?” He cites his current project, transforming people’s dream descriptions into AI visualisations, as an example: It’s partly looking at a kind of commonality between our unconscious states, but also the whole tool as an artwork is a form of guidance for seeing and being seen.” In Ghost, each paddle Chodzko takes shapes the audience-of-one’s experience, directing what they can see and hear from the kayak. It’s this deep reflexivity, between the offer inherent in his work, and the audiences’ contributions and reactions, which makes his work so powerful to encounter, and endlessly intriguing.

Ghost
Ghost (2010- ongoing) in Cornwall, 2018. Sculpture, performance, sustained process, and video. Photo credit: Steve Tanner

Biography

Thru hole I blind/​O/​Thru hole oui see’, 2020. Production still from video

Adam Chodzko is a visual artist, working across media, exploring our conscious and unconscious behaviours, social relations and collective imaginations through artworks created as speculative forms of social media.’ 

His work asks; Through vision, how can we be?

Adam has exhibited extensively in international solo and group exhibitions since 1991, including: Tate Britain, Tate St. Ives; Raven Row, Museo d’Arte Moderna, Bologna; The Benaki Museum, Athens; Istanbul and Venice Biennales etc. Commissions include Creative Time, (NY); Frieze, and the Wellcome Trust. Awards include: Paul Hamlyn Foundation’s Awards for Artists, Foundation for Contemporary Art – New York, AHRC Research Fellowship, DACS Art360.

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