Mirror, mirrorRosslynd Piggott and Rudi Williams 
InterviewExhibited works

Interview:
Rosslynd Piggott and Rudi Williams 
In conversation with Sue Cramer


Melbourne, July 2024 

Surfaces and Interiors



    • [Sue cramer]
Both surfaces and interiors are important to your works. How might you describe their relationship?

  • [Rosslynd Piggott]
A surface can be seen as an interior in itself; a collection or an accumulation of surfaces is the very substance and vibration of an interior space. Juhani Pallasmaa, in his beautiful architectural text The Eyes of the Skin (1996), writes about our sensual encounters with surfaces, and how these register in our daily lives, and in our internalised daydreaming. But then so did Marcel Proust, Jun'ichirō Tanizaki, Gaston Bachelard, and many others. The substrate of surface is so wildly rich and enriching, both sensually and cerebrally. The complexity of sensual contact, so powerfully elemental to our humanity and to human history, is something I fear we are losing in this time of digital flatness.



Rosslynd Piggott, studio interior, Chinese cork garden and temple,orchids. 2014.


  • [RUDI WILLIAMS]
When I walk through museums with historic collections, I'm always a little intrigued when works are veiled by glass. The glass often distorts the details and surfaces of the artworks with reflections of the surrounding interior and the viewer. Yet sometimes this can set up an interesting encounter or suggest an idea for a photograph.
  • For example, when traveling in 2014, I visited the Neues Museum in Berlin to see the famed bust of Nefertiti. I recall the bust was located upstairs, placed in her own room inside a glass vitrine. I was shocked to see her reflection cast clearly in the internal layer of the glass vitrine—to me this seemed like a kind of purgatory, to be spending an afterlife staring at your own reflection. I was compelled to take a photograph of this, but photography wasn’t permitted. Instead, when I returned to Melbourne, I made a sculpture using a postcard of the artifact as a stand-in for the bust, resting in a miniature reflective vitrine.
  • To answer your question more broadly, interiors can be works of art in their own right that result from design considerations—such as how people move through a space, and what holds significance in that space. Surfaces are small glimpses within interiors which often capture the abstract residues of history—like a handprint on the window, a worn step made slippery over time, or a reflection or stain on the floor. Interiors and surfaces each contain the other, they simply require different viewpoints. Like the difference between seeing and understanding. 



Rudi Williams, Nefertiti’s reflection, Acrylic, mild steel, postcard. 2014.