Spotlight: Blaike Gillshaw talks us through their photobook Dinner @ Mine!

12/12/24

Beth Evans

Blaike Gillshaw [@befmakes] is an artist, illustrator and writer based in Plymouth, Devon. Their practice is multifaceted and spans everything from indie publications and humorous yet informed drawings to large scale, conceptual installations. Today they're joining us to talk through their photobook Dinner @ Mine.

Untitled, @befmakesart

BE: Can you give us a little intro into the project and how you came up with the idea?

BG: Sure! So Dinner @ Mine was conceptualised and realised during a residency i was doing at KARST. I had a studio space at the gallery for 6 months and i used to walk there almost every evening after work. It was about a 30 minute commute there, and the same back, so my walks became quite informative and an extension of my time in the studio really.

I was also working on (and still haven't finished) a project called Yellow Lines where i was/am photographing interesting objects i saw on yellow lines on the road. So, I was looking at the floor a lot on my travels. I basically just started keeping an eye out for interesting things i found on the floor... and shopping lists cropped up often.

Untitled, @befmakesart

BE: how does this project differ to work you'd made previously?

BG: That's a good question! It is a little different in the sense that it's pretty much free standing. Previously, when i've made publications, they've been a part of a larger body of work and whilst i made this book during my time at KARST, it wasn't embedded in a themed installation in the same way.

For example, for a project i made in 2022, Love is a Flammable Thing, i wrote and published a poetry collection by the same name that sat in a waiting-room-inspired installation. it's a whole other story to explain but 'm really proud of that project.

But, it was nice to do something that stands on its own, that is engaging and fun and a little strange that doesn't feel intwined and tied up with a whole body of work that only exists in context for a week or two. It's a lava lamp not a rocket ship.

Untitled, @befmakesart

BE: A lava lamp not a rocket ship?

BG: Yeah! That's a concept i came up with during the KARST residency. I got a lava lamp for Christmas and i couldn't stop looking at it. I thought it was strange how the blobs don't mean anything yet are so mesmerising, that the water isn't even coloured, just the glass and how as a lamp they are not very effective or efficient. they barely light up a room, you can't leave them on for more than 6 hours and they take 3 hours or so before the wax even starts moving! Yet, despite all of that - or because of all of that - they are brilliant!

Lava lamps are kind of like rockets. Except rockets are precise and require crazy engineering and complicated decisions and ideas and maths and degrees - and so much energy and money and power and time and people. And really they are nothing like a lava lamp. I love making rocket ships. Complicated ideas that are all tangled up in a black hole of ideas and theories and lore but i also wanted to embrace the lava lamps of the world and make silly, fun things that are just as considered but for completely different reasons.

I'm not sure if that makes total sense but neither do lava lamps so...

Untitled, @befmakesart

BE: What was it about the shopping lists that intrigued you?

BG: Growing up, i was always really interested in people's handwriting. I loved trying to guess who had addressed the envelopes of birthday cards i received through the post! The culture surrounding it is something i noticed at school - where you had to earn a pen licence and prove you could write in a pretty way but as you grow up and get out in the world there's so much variation and i love that there's a visual cologne almost - like a way to recognise people and to demonstrate the intimacy of which we know someone. We can recognise their cologne, and their handwriting.

I think it's a lot like walking. We were all taught pretty much the same, basic thing and yet everyone has their own accidental quirks, styles and habits.

And then there is the content! Some of these lists i was finding were just odd. There's two, i think, that are written on the back's of eulogies, or some sort of notice of death. One is a kid's list of shops to visit in town and some have a really interesting combination of edible and inedible items and i thought the juxtaposition made for a good read!

Untitled, @befmakesart

BE: What was the process of putting the book together like?

BG: I've written and published books independently before so i had a bit of a handle on what to do but this is the first photobook i've produced so i kept it pretty simple. I photocopied all of the lists on the copiers at my place of work and put them all on a piece of blue craft paper so they'd have some uniformity.

For the larger lists i had to use two pieces of the blue paper to back them because all i had was A4. So, there was a tiny bit of editing involved - but just blurring the join between those two A4 sheets. And, I just used photoshop or illustrator for that. Formatting was super easy - i just cropped the images to the page size i wanted. It was easy apart from one page which is a list that spans over the centre-fold and getting those pages to line up took a bit of trial and error.

Untitled, @befmakesart

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