EM24: Spotlight on Toby Curtis

What are the central themes of your exhibition?

Reuse, recombination, sample-based music, textures, oscillating modalities, the felt and the seen. I’m going to have blindfolds so people can see it with their eyes and then feel it with their hands. It’s going to be very sculptural and immersive.

Do you often do interactive pieces?

I had ideas like this when I was in my third year of university, a few things that were multi-panelled pieces, but this one is going to look distinctly like one entity.

How does your life relate to your work?

My work is my life. I make and make and make and I think about art constantly, I have done since I was a young lad. I started creating when I was 13 with photorealistic pencil drawings. Then graffiti took over my life and it was all I thought about for 30 years. Every minute of every day. This has kind of taken over really—I used to resent working full-time because I had all of these ideas of what I wanted to make but I had no energy to when I’d get home.

What would you want a visitor gain from your exhibit?

I’d just like people to find it interesting and kind of think, ‘Wow, I’ve never seen a piece of work like that before that asks me to interact with it in multiple different ways’. I’d like them to go away and think about the different ways I asked them to pay attention to the work.

Interviewed by Charlotte Pimm-Smith.