Nathaniel Mellors’ brilliantly absurd work Ourhouse (2010 – ongoing) consists of a mixture of ‘normal’ TV soap-drama, horror, slapstick, theater and sitcom. Its characters, narrative and setting are hard to pin down as either fantasy, sci-fi or medieval, because the fascinating balance between genres, language, costumes and technical aspects is somewhere in the middle.

In the following excerpt from an interview done in December 2012 with Jacob Fabricius, Mellors talks about his inspiration and the beginning of the Ourhouse series:

I think the initial idea was to come up with a scenario that could work for a kind of mutant TV series. A kind of hybrid conceptual artwork and TV show. This desire came out of a long-standing preoccupation with TV that I had been exploring in various potentially inappropriate ways in video installation and sculpture since I was student. It goes back to work I made in the late 1990s. I grew up watching a lot of great British and American TV – and in my teens, before art school, I was involved with various local music scenes. So as I learnt art – which is a peculiar process – I found myself pulling away, trying to collapse and expand the logic of certain artforms – some of which felt like they had become quite rule-bound - with ideas that I could run with almost unconsciously. And, looking back, these more unconscious ideas tended to be steeped in the influence of television and music, particularly the sensibility of British industrial music – these were my teenage childhood interests. Cinema comes in more consciously, I think, later. But the low-end culture, like TV, is there from the beginning. So – anyway – coming out of my MA in sculpture I was working with a total installation form, with a lot of fragmented video projection and improvised sculpture and sound, filming strange video narratives with friends – mixing up actors and non-professional performers. The process developed and I found a kind of methodology in it. And then I made more of a commitment to writing, at first because I wanted the dynamics and potential I had found in the installations I had made – in works like Profondo Viola (2004) and Hateball (2005) – to occur in the films. At a certain point I thought I should try and approach the form not as a kind of deconstructive exercise but as a closed text. I started to feel that deconstruction could in some ways be a default position for an artist – deconstructing the forms of the day – and that to make something that could hold its own relative to its inspirations, maybe I needed to more thoroughly generate something that was formally distinct, from the bottom up. Maybe I needed to go backwards to go forwards. I was looking at a lot of Pasolini as this was developing. There was a specific opportunity, too, which was a great jump-off point for me – in 2009 Jonty Claypole, a producer at the BBC, invited me to make a short work for BBC One, to kick off the final episode of David Dimbleby’s The Seven Ages of Britain series. The show is a potted history of British culture and the final episode covers the entire 20th Century. So I made The 7 Ages of Britain Teaser (2010), an artwork about broadcasting and history, featuring David Dimbleby performing with a highly naturalistic silicon prosthesis of his own face. Gwendoline Christie (The Operator) and Johnny Vivash (Kadmus) play two crap deities who are battling for control of this Dimbleby-face – they think they can control the Modern age through the icon. This was my first experience of working in TV. I'd been making work inspired by TV and then I was able to make a work that took TV as its subject and was also broadcast on BBC One, to several million people. The work has the production values of BBC TV but it’s also resolutely an artwork – Dimbleby describes the status of the work itself within the work – which makes it even stranger – it’s a hybrid. There’s a seed there that I wanted to grow and grow. I was already working repeatedly with excellent actors – my friends Gwendoline Christie, Johnny Vivash and David Birkin – and suddenly I wanted to do a lot more work with this BBC crew – the D.P., Ben Wheeler (who was shooting Peepshow and The Thick of It for Channel 4) the actors and I all felt a really good connection. So I went off and I wanted to have a scenario that could generate a potentially endless stream of episodes, like in a soap opera or long-running drama – something like Twin Peaks. Then this very sculptural and literary image occurred to me – a figure that eats books – at the heart of a story. And this figure is not recognized as human by the other characters. It is referred to as The Object. It’s a kind of device – the books The Object eats, half-digests and regurgitates influence the story. It’s a fleshy, human printer engaged in the grotesque egestion of a literal Never Ending Story. I came up with this core idea for the Ourhouse scenario and then I asked my friend Dan Fox to help me with the character and story development - because he's such a good writer and editor, very precise where I am very messy. We did that for 6 months and then I wrote the first set of scripts, about 70 pages or so, in a few weeks. The first three episodes of Ourhouse emerged, with two animatronic Ourhouse sculptures for exhibition at De Hallen, Haarlem in September 2010 – Xander Karskens commissioned the work for De Hallen with Tom Morton and Lisa Le Feuvre for British Art Show 7. That helped keep me on track during quite an intense period of work.

Nathaniel Mellors (B. Doncaster, 1974) is an artist and musician who lives and works in Amsterdam. He is a Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Art Practice at Leeds Metropolitan University and an advisor at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten, Amsterdam.

Jacob Fabricius (B. 1970, based in Copenhagen) has just been appointed director and curator at Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen. He was director at Malmö Konsthall from 2008 to 2013. Founder of Pork Salad.

Credits

Ourhouse Episode 1, 2 & 4 commissioned by De Hallen Haarlem and British Art Show 7 – In The Days of the Comet with the support of the Netherlands Film Fund; the Fonds B.K.V.B; Matt’s Gallery, London, Galerie Diana Stigter, Amsterdam; MONITOR, Rome; ICA, London.

Ourhouse Episode 3 commissioned by SMART Project Space, Amsterdam with the support of the Netherlands Film Fund and the Fonds B.K.V.B. Additional support from Eastside Projects, Birmingham; Matt’s Gallery, London; Galerie Diana Stigter, Amsterdam; MONITOR, Rome.

Ourhouse Episodes 1-4 produced by NOMAD (Michael Smythe & Piera Buckland), Nathaniel Mellors & Gwendoline Christie.