Tom O'sullivan & Joanne Tatham Think Thingamajig and Other Things

The Glasgow artist duo Joanne Tatham (b1971 in West Yorkshire) and Tom O’Sullivan (b1967 in Norwich), who have worked together since 1995, attracted attention last year in the Tramway exhibition space in Glasgow with their installation HK. Six-meter-high black letters formed the three-dimensional slogan ‹Heroin Kills›, undermined by its monumental nature. Tatham & O’Sullivan, whose works are in the tradition of concept art, are concerned with the questioning of the parameters of art, the investigation of what contemporary art can be and what it can accomplish. The installation HK therefore operated in the realm between purely artistic statement and social reality (given that Glasgow is the British city with the highest rate of heroin addicts). Tatham & O’Sullivan draw their image and form vocabulary from a rich store of existing languages, extending from art history over applied arts, esotericism, and pop music to theater, while their interest is primarily in hyper-encoded and iconic forms. Their installations are however more than merely a sampling of various quotes; they are a clever play on the multireferential nature of the characters employed, not least of all satirically referring to the clichés of installation art.
The installation Think Thingamajig and other Things is being developed for their first large individual exhibition outside the United Kingdom; in the center of their installation stands a pyramidal object with mystic insinuations. Thingamajig is a term that aptly characterizes Tatham & O’Sullivan’s objects: They seem to be familiar, yet they do not allow themselves to be easily placed in an existing category. But Thingamajig is also the title of a particular object in the exhibition, a small black cube, on the sides of which a pink diamond form appears. Cult object? Art? Tatham & O’Sullivan understand how to blur the boundaries and to filter the fine nuances out of their objects and installations, despite their tendency toward the theatrical and strong productions: namely the nuances between the basic elements of quote, pastiche, and parody.