Corbin Shaw: Little Dark Age.
Artist Corbin Shaw talks us through the imagined future relics that feature in his major new solo show at London’s Incubator gallery.
Remember satellite dishes? Those saucer-shaped bits of tech you used to see bolted to the sides of houses? When they started appearing in the UK in the early 1980s, offering access to a new and expensive world of multichannel TV, they were like a big metal badge pinned to your facade advertising your wealth and status and how strikingly contemporary you were. And then over the course of a decade, as they became cheaper and started popping up like mushrooms across entire streets and spreading up tower blocks, their glow of new-tech sexiness dimmed, slipping from covetable consumer object to ubiquitous cliché to conspicuous eyesore. And now, long rendered obsolete by technological progress, they sit like rusting relics of a pre-internet past, their purpose a mystery to anyone too young to have grown up with them.
Corbin Shaw’s new show Little Dark Age is in part about the life cycle of the objects we fill our lives with: their glamorous advent, their initial exclusivity, their mass-production and ubiquity, their inevitable obsolescence. He’s less interested in the objects themselves than the social judgements that are ascribed to them, the role social class plays in these hierarchies of ‘taste’, and what these objects mean to the people who fill their life with them. He imagines one of the anonymous, identical and empty new-build houses currently being built across the fields of England (and which feature in the poster for the show), a couple moving in and filling it with stuff bought off Amazon, and how those possessions might look to observers from a future long after the family have moved on and left a lifetime of consumption behind.
The conversation that follows took place a week before the show launched, in the artist’s East London studio, in which the many objects he has created for Little Dark Age are piled up in themed groups. Not all of these works will make it into the show. A satellite dish, for example, will not survive the final edit because he will conclude that his cast of a wi-fi router makes the same point; neither will a slogan-emblazoned England flag, for reasons that will become clear in the conversation. He says he decided to call it Little Dark Age in reference to the period in England after the Romans left, ‘when they said nothing good got made here’. ‘And I thought the word “little” was quite optimistic. I liked the idea that there is a time of darkness, but after this there will be light.’
This is not America, 2024 giclee on Hahnemühle Photo Rag Metallic. (Left) No Ball Games, 2024 Wood, pebble dash, resin, plastic. (Right)
Perfect: What are the new-build houses on the show poster about?
Corbin: I wanted the show to feel like a domestic setting in a new-build house, filled with objects that are symbolic of where England’s national identity is now. A lot of these objects are comments on consumerist, capitalist drives to fill our homes with trends and things that permeate our lives until they fall out of fashion. Now that I’ve got a car and I drive up and down the country, I see what were once green spaces taken up by huge warehouses full of rubbish that goes out to people constantly ordering stuff online. In Orgreave [near where he grew up], where there used to be a field is now a new-build housing estate – privately owned, not social housing – with Amazon warehouses and fast-fashion factories. So in this show I’m trying to use the house to talk about all these goods that we buy. I have an idea of this new-build house as a new-build ruin, because these new houses are not built to last. The show is like a new-build house that was abandoned, and all the objects left behind can tell us about the family that used to live here.
Like an archaeological site in the future digging up our recent past?
Yeah – it’s a collection of objects that at first seem to make no sense but in fact do make sense. I’m also trying to take things from the past and bring them into the present, like these old 18th, 19th-century Toby jugs and Staffordshire dogs; things that are quite ornate and were of status once, but over time they trickled down and became kitsch – taking them and almost vandalising them, in a way. I was thinking about when John Ruskin went to Venice and came back to Britain and was so furious at how the industrialists were ruining the landscape here. I was thinking about that in relation to central London, where you have these beautiful stone buildings with carvings that had so many hours spent on them, and then they became centres of capital with generic shop fronts for sports brands and American candy stores. It’s like these landscapes in Britain that aren’t being protected, and having these new-build estates and these clipper factories built on them. In my show I wanted to vandalise the past in a similar way to what they’re doing and bring those things into the present or even push them into the future.
In a way that fails to appreciate their meaning or beauty?
Yeah. Because there is something quite beautiful about Toby jugs and what they stand for, or how they would have stood for a marker of taste, sat in somebody’s window.
Carl, 2024, Porcelain. (Left) Churchill Carlsberg, 2024, Porcelain. (Middle) King of Hearts, 2024, Porcelain. (Right)
Like horse brasses, which adorned working horses and were once proudly displayed around fireplaces – by the end of the 20th century they'd fallen from status symbols to kitsch trinkets.
There are so many of them on eBay – I think they’re so beautiful. I’ve seen them in so many pubs and never really understood what they were for until I went home and spoke to my mum and dad, who talked about them being on all these amazing show horses that would have paraded up and down the street. So I cast these horse brasses for the show to say something about the way things become obsolete. My idea was, as the workhorse became obsolete and was replaced by the work van, these car badges are kind of the same thing. I wanted to create something where the past and present co-exist in a similar pattern. I think these rocks are, for me, the most symbolic of the show. Just as a package could turn up at your door from wherever, so these rocks that I collected from the banks of the Thames could have washed up from anywhere – maybe they fell off a cliff somewhere in the UK or maybe Sweden or somewhere else in Europe. And they came up the Thames and I took them and wrote these words on them, like ‘delivered’, or the Amazon smile logo.
Tell me about the tapestries. I feel like I recognise the landscapes but they could be anywhere in the UK.
Yeah, they’re liminal spaces around suburban areas: shopping centres, retail parks, new estates. I sometimes feel like I have this ‘death to the new’ attitude, but actually so much of the newness that I grew up with I'm really attached to. The village where I grew up was near the M1, and when I was a kid we'd go to the motorway service station where I’d eventually work when I was 18 – that was our meeting point. And when I got my first car, me and my girlfriend at the time would drive up to the retail park and sit and chat in the car. I’ve got so much emotional attachment to these bland, liminal space that no one really thinks about. So for the show I wanted these landscapes that were so bland they were almost invisible, but maybe they meant something to the family that hung them on the wall. All my life exists in this way, where it’s been shopping centres, retail parks, supermarkets, like… I actually really love them. I’m not supposed to, but I kind of do. And now I see so many young people on TikTok creating slideshows of how Tesco looked in 2003, or how packaging looked 20 years ago. I feel like the broad feeling in England now is this complete melancholy and nostalgia for very recent times. I don’t know if it’s a post-Covid thing where people are haunted by what went before and are trying to commemorate that. I think in this exhibition, I’m kind of exercising that, in a way.
Josh, 2024, Cotton thread. (Left) Lucy, 2024, Cotton thread. (Right)
Drakehouse, 2024 Jacquard woven blanket, wooden board. (Left) Underpass, 2024, Jacquard woven blanket, wooden board. (Middle) Crystal Peaks, 2024 Jacquard woven blanket, wooden board. (Right)
Those TikTok clips feature in a compilation video you’ve made for the show.
Yeah, I’ve got them projected onto a van door. There’s an amazing video of this lad who works in stone masonry and can carve beautiful bits of what could be put on a Gothic building – he does fireplaces, and his whole TikTok page is of him and his craft. Because a lot of this show is about craft. I didn’t want anyone to think that in this show I’m saying that craft is dead, because I think craft actually does exist, and it exists in the hands of people like my parents, really [his dad is a welder, his mum a hairdresser]. I think that’s why I’m focusing so much on work and labour. Because from such an early age, my parents said to me, ‘You’re only worth what you can do with your hands – it’s your craft, it’s your trade,’ and they always put such importance on ‘you’re gonna learn how to cut hair’ or ‘you're going to learn how to weld’. I wasn’t really interested in those, but I learned how to draw and that became my thing, and I feel incredibly blessed that I found my thing, my craft, through my hands. And that's why a lot of my work is made by me and it’s very analogue a lot of the time. And I think there is still a lot of craft that exists in the UK and it’s in labour: it exists in, you know, roofers, in hairdressers, in barbers, in nail artists. Even in football fans at matches – there’s a kind of folk tradition of people singing these songs about their areas and their people.
Little Dark Age is your first show in the wealthy art scene of Marylebone. Do you think this takes your work to a different audience?
Definitely. I think sometimes I do like that idea of encroaching into territory where maybe this feels quite alien, or I feel quite alien. And – not to sound really cheesy, but – it's a flag in the ground to mark the culture of the people I know from back home. Because it is very suburban, like a lot of my work, because that’s where I grew up. And I did think, will people actually understand this? Not that I need to make it for that.
Did you create this show for the gallery specifically? Or was this the show you would have created regardless of the location?
I think this is where my practice was probably was going and what I was thinking about and what my concerns were. It’s the work that I think I’ve always wanted to make, and it's across so many different mediums. I feel like I’ve been leading up to the point of making this work for such a long time. And I’m really, really proud of it.
Pavement, 2024 Charcoal Rubbing. (Left) He Was 42 and Alone, 2024 Charcoal Rubbing (Right)
I see here you have a new addition to your series of St George’s flags, with ‘made in Vietnam’ on it in that tabloid font.
Yeah, that's made by a woman in Vietnam – I gave her the instructions, she made it and sent it me back, and I paid for her work. I was interested in what it means when a coronation or a royal birthday happens and the flags that go up aren’t actually made here, they’re printed elsewhere. What does that say about where we are now as a country? And the embroideries of these iconic British scenes in the show are made by this one woman in Sri Lanka on [freelancers' app] Fiverr. I don’t know if I’ll put this flag in the show, because for the longest time so many people have said to me, ‘You’re the person that makes the flags.’
It’s like people forget that you’ve worked in industrial materials too, like the sports trophies that you cast and the metal model you made early on of your dad’s house. Although I guess technically textiles are industrial…
It’s different because it’s gendered. That’s why I always enjoyed working in textiles, because I liked the idea of representing hypermasculinity through something which was gendered as female. Actually, in this show, I’ve got metal frames that were welded by my dad. I’ve recreated two walls from my village – one pebbledash, the other brick – and there are slabs with slogans on them, and they all have aluminium frames. I got quotes to have them made in London – it was going to cost £500. My dad was like, ‘You’re joking! It’s only 70 quid for the metal. Give me the measurements, I'll do it.’ I can't thank him enough because he obviously saved me a load of money, but also it's quite sentimental to me now. Because, like with that metal house, it’s something that I made with my dad. I do eventually want to work one day in metal; I’m just working out what that is and when it would be. But yeah, I’m really happy to have a piece of him in the show as well. I've got an idea for the future, though. My dad always sends me these pictures of his welding and says, ‘Now that’s art.’ Imagine if you could have these huge flanges – a bit like that Mike Nelson show with the industrial machinery – or something that my dad welded in a gallery alongside something that I’d done. A joint show with my dad. I hope it happens one day.
Little Dark Age runs till 26 May at Incubator, 2 Chiltern St, London W1U 7PR.