Conrad Shawcross: exploring the work of British art’s brightest star. By Nick Compton.
The youngish British artist Conrad Shawcross drives a Ford Capri. The closest a British-made car came to American muscle, he loves the ‘physical and visceral’ fun of driving it, the sheer effort it takes to haul its ridiculous nose around corners. It’s his second. He fitted a chair, fishing rods and a kite to the roof of his first and called it the Investigation Bureau into the Location of the Soul. Sadly, someone with a hard-to-locate soul nicked it.
While he was a student, Shawcross drove a Leyland Sherpa van, a Midlands-made rival to the Ford Transit. In reliability terms, it was everything the Transit was not; Shawcross bought a Haynes Manual and learnt to take the engine apart and put it back together again. ‘It was all quite mystical to me,’ he says. ‘I couldn’t imagine how people managed to make these things. They were so clever. But I learnt the language and how it works. And that was how I got into moving parts.'...
