How I create… with artist Luke Jerram

Luke Jerram is a British artist known for his large-scale installations and ambitious live art projects.

His works have seen him introduce a giant waterslide to Bristol’s urban centre, strand fishing boats in woodland and wrap a medieval North Walian bridge in a patchwork quilt. He’s also become recognised for his luminescent celestial spheres – representations of earth, mars, the sun and the moon – often presented suspended in great buildings or part-submerged in bodies of water.

This summer we present two of Jerram’s works here at the Southbank Centre. One of his inspiring floating planet installations, Gaia, which recreates earth through high-resolution NASA imagery and exquisite lighting, will offer a dramatic backdrop to two classical concerts in our Royal Festival Hall. While out on our terrace, the playful Stepping Out, invites you to make music with your feet in a playground of sonic exploration.

And as his works begin to take their place among our buildings, Jerram kindly offered us this insight into his creative process.

When and where do you find yourself at your most creative?

I’ve taught myself over the years to be able to sit down with a notebook and pen and produce eight to ten new ideas for arts projects, no matter how I’m feeling or where I am. I often collect and then feed the ingredients (the brief) into my mind beforehand. Sometimes the best ideas come to me after a day of boiling up these ideas, pondering and problem solving, just as I’m drifting off to sleep. There’s something about changing states of mind, that allows solutions to problems to arrive, almost out of thin air, between one state of consciousness and another.

How do you know when an idea is worth developing into something more?

I’ve no shortage of ideas for art projects, the hardest thing is working out which is worth pursuing. I try to look at the potential for a new artwork and consider ways it can be read, interpreted and interacted with, by people from different parts of society. How would a four year old child experience and interpret this artwork? How would a dustman, architect, curator, artist or scientist interpret it? I try to make art that has multiple doors of entry, so the works can be accessed and interpreted (and dare I say sometimes even enjoyed) in different ways, depending on what people bring to them.

A great idea for an artwork might arrive as a quiet whisper. It’s important to listen carefully and write these fleeting ideas down on paper quickly before they get lost in the wind. Even then it’s hard to know which of the artworks described on paper should be invested in to try to make reality. I have a stack of more than 200 illustrated postcards on my desk, all describing new art projects I’ve not yet made. Sometimes I’ll refer to this deck when I’m given a brief to create a new artwork, in case there’s a project here waiting for this very opportunity to come into being. It’s hard to know if the artworks in the deck are there because they’re not very good – rejections from other commissioning opportunities – or if they could in fact be the next big thing.

Which tools are key to your creative process?

A black biro, some lined paper, relevant books and articles to read, plus time away from other distractions. 

Who are you creating your work for, and how free are you to create the work you want to create?

I feel free to create the artwork I want to make, but I get approached by organisations asking me to make artworks for their specific requirements and context. If I’m given a brief from an organisation it often helps to limit and put a frame around the possibilities of an artwork, which in turn helps the creative process. As well as taking on commissions I develop artworks I want to make, and often reach out to likeminded organisations I know who I feel might be interested to present or invest in these new works.

How do you stay disciplined, and dedicated to your work?

My father was a milkman and worked very long hours for decades before his body finally had enough of the physical labour and night shifts. I like to think I’ve applied his work ethic to my field of work. It’s important to be disciplined and keep turning up, reliably delivering what I’ve promised.

What do you do when you hit a wall; when you feel unmotivated or uninspired? How do you overcome this?

I’ve around eight to ten arts projects in development at any given time, so by putting down one project and picking up another, it provides me with some breathing room and gives me time for ideas and solutions to problems to be found. If I’ve hit a wall with a project I try to work out what the questions are that I’m failing to answer. If you can articulate the problem and find the right question, then there’s usually a solution or set of answers out there which will unlock the puzzle.

Who do you look to for feedback? 

I’m often running ideas for artwork past my staff, family and friends. Building prototypes for artworks provides more certainty that an arts project is or isn’t worth pursuing.

How different is your creative process now to when you first began as an artist?

I used to develop sculptures and installations just by playing with materials and exploring phenomena and seeing what emerged. Whereas these days I can still do these things but also play with concepts, digital technologies and think about things in many different ways. I’ve been making artworks now for 30 years, so I have a lot of experience and understanding of the practical problems I may face if I make one type of large scale public artwork or another. In some ways this experience is incredibly informative and useful, in other ways I can see it beginning to hold me back – dissuading me from taking on new projects. 

Ambitious projects like Park and Slide, Sky Orchestra and Aeolus benefited from my naivety, from me not knowing the challenges I’d be faced with along the way and what could possibly go wrong. I wonder whether, if I’d have known the complexities and the problems I’d have faced with these projects, I would have attempted them?

What does success feel like?

Success can be a sense of relief that an arts project has been delivered without anything major going wrong. Occasionally I can be installing an artwork somewhere in the world and I’ll snap to and realise how privileged I am to have the opportunity to make art with the support of the people and organisations around me, and then share it with the public.

Success can be the occasional times I witness a visitor to my work in tears of joy or seeing a queue of exciting visitors near a museum, then realising they are queuing up to see my work! Success can be measured by the impact of the charitable work my team and I are doing through the Jerram Foundation – a community interest company I set up with funds from the touring of my artwork.

Is there a piece of advice you’ve received that you often find yourself returning to?

Too many pieces of advice to mention. But here are few that come to mind. Play by your own rules – it’s good to know the rules, but fundamentally up to us to choose which rules we want to play by. And when it comes to attempting to make great art it’s important to have ‘stamina of dissatisfaction’.

And then in terms of advice from others. ‘Luck is about being ready’ – Brian Eno; ‘create your own stage’ – Jeremy Deller; and ‘genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration’ – Thomas Edison

What’s the most recent thing you learned about yourself through your work? 

I’ve learned that I’m still curious and interested in the world. I’m still driven and passionate about making artwork and using creativity to solve problems, to try and make the world a slightly better place.

How do you know when you’re done?

There’s a real sense of relief when an artwork is installed and the public are enjoying it. But even once it’s live, there’s always more work to be done – learning things with an ambition to improve the public’s experience ready for next time the artwork is presented. A new artwork also needs documenting, and then promoting through social media and local and national press, to let the public know there is an opportunity to experience it. It sometimes feels, even if an installation artwork gets presented a dozen times, that there is always more work to be done, more lessons to be learned, and ways in which the work can be improved.