Hamish Pearch gives us something to chew on

“I need to get into the universe that I want to build,” explains Hamish Pearch, gesturing around the loft of his Victorian studio in north London where the walls and workbenches are covered with sculptures, collected objects, books and paints. Life-size bronze casts of pens, cashew nuts, chewed gum and tree branches have been assembled into new configurations. It’s difficult to tell what has been made and what has been found.

When we meet, Pearch is gearing up for his solo show, ‘Smoky Moth and Mike’ at Ginny on Frederick. Referencing colossal disasters: storms, bombs, suns and galaxies, the title humorously challenges our perception of scale. Looking at his sculptures, which resemble atom-like structures made from cast bronze pens, pencils with chewed nibs, highlighters and matchsticks welded together, I can’t help but think about scales of impact: a worldwide rupture caused by microscopic infectious virus cells. This touches upon the very nexus of Pearch’s work: how we understand reality not by objects, but by the relationship between them. Subject and object; the body and the world and the intertwining of self and other, something the poet Paul Valéry labelled as “a chiasm between two destinies.”

“Everything is about relationships,” Pearch explains, pointing to diagrams of the universe. “Me to you, you to object, object to me. This creates an underlying and constantly shifting system with several streams of thought overlapping and interacting at once, how the brain generally works, and you have an incredibly complex world. I love to sit in that, to try and fail to understand it”

In Pearch’s world, the room itself becomes a transformative space wherein each show seamlessly unfurls into the next. Each piece is titled after the specific time it was crafted, described as “sculptural photographs” that freeze moments in time. “By calling a sculpture a time of day, I like the idea that time is carried through an object. It becomes like a stopped watch and a logic unto itself.”

Outside the studio, Pearch and his partner, Song-I Saba set up a collaborative project called Complex Thoughts, making necklaces and vases. “It’s an extension of my artistic practice, it started when I made a pendant for my partner as a gift. It was a cast of gum I chewed and imbued with the thoughts I had thought about her while chewing it. We wanted to open this idea out and create one-off pendants imbued with thoughts – each cast gum coming with a set of thoughts like notes in a perfume.”

Back in the studio, Pearch picks up R.D. Laing’s book Knots which lays out poetic examples of interpersonal relationships. Pearch has been in psychotherapy for a number of years and this year started group therapy. “Therapy has been a process of holding a space where my knots can be untangled, looked at and re-knotted. Group therapy complicates the knots, at times it becomes a cat’s cradle, at others, it shifts and becomes a tug-of-war.”

For Pearch, even language is inadequate, “I’m interested in how we give language to form, how we attempt to define things within our collective experience – form that’s beyond our comprehension,” concluding that art communicates complexities beyond the limitations of language. “It’s why I find object-making so compelling, it’s so laden with failure,” he explains. “I find that deeply human.” Each of Pearch’s objects is defined in this ineffable way. They are their own constellations, their own coordinates existing within their own space and time.