The first thing I see is a large, flashy image. A one-minute movie involving a model running through a wall, which explodes on contact… “What is that he is running through?” I question in shock at the impact, observing the seven-foot columns made, I’m informed, of flour and tiny polystyrene boxes combusting into a million little pieces.

 

“As you can see it was a messy set-up,” Jacob laughs, the movie replaying – flour and polystyrene everywhere. Most of the exhibition was shot in the Truman Brewery – “We had it for about a week,” he says, “When we had a super-good system, it took about two and a half hours to make one tower.” And exactly how many times did the model have to run through it? “I think we did five columns on the moving image and four or five on the stills. But it takes quite a lot of time because once it had exploded everything in the warehouse got covered.” I guess you resign yourself to the mess? “Yeah!” Jacob exclaims, “It was pretty messy. And we were shooting on a Phantom, which is a very expensive moving image camera, so we had to seal everything in plastic, and on some of the shots we were driving alongside the model in a van hanging out of the door - the door strapped open and lighting behind me. So it was quite a crazy set-up.” It does beg the inevitable question: Were you ever tempted to run through it yourself? “My assistant John got to do it in the practice. They take turns to do horrible things. Like this project [he points to his Mac]. We built an underwater tank, which we filled with milky water. But Alistair had to do the test for that – so he was floating around in freezing cold milk for a while.”

 

Welcome to the wonderful world of Jacob Sutton. 

  

BD: Jacob, let’s start at the beginning: How did you meet Hana?

 

JS: We were assistants together. I think she did furniture design first, before working for a furniture designer for years. So she is really good technically.

  

BD: And did you always want enter this line of work? To be a creative in the arts world?

 

JS: I think so. My Dad’s a painter. I used to sit and watch him draw. I actually wanted to be a graphic designer when I was about fifteen.

 

BD: And you didn’t pursue it?

 

JS: I did actually work as a graphic designer, for an Australian newspaper when I was 18. I went to Australia two days after my A Levels with no money and ended up getting a job in a Western Australian desert town. I lied my way into that job.

 

BD: How did you do that?

 

JS: I made up a CV, but after a while they cottoned on that I was only 18. It is not really cutting edge in Western Australia. I only had one pair of trousers and one shirt. I was really broke. I had loads of Quicksilver T Shirts and not a lot else. But I was trying to look smart and blag my way through the job. They called me into an office after about a week and said, ‘So exactly how old are you?’

 

BD: Were you capable of doing the job?

 

JS: Well yeah, I just did drawings of diggers; it was a coal-mining town, so I just did silly cartoons of mines.

 

BD: And how did you meet your other partner, Gary Card?

 

JS: I met Gary when I came to London. I didn’t have anywhere to live when I first got here.

 

BD: You turned up again with no money?

 

JS: I did actually. I had a moped, which I rode to London from my parent’s house in the Cotswold’s. It took about six-and-a-half hours. I’m going to sound like such a tramp in this interview. So I got here and stayed with a guy that I had done my foundation course with. Then I met some people that Gary lived with, some girls. I went round for dinner and managed to secure one of the rooms in their house.

 

BD: You schmoozed them?

 

JS: Yeah I had to be really chatty – it was a gag factory. So I moved in and it was like seven girls and Gary. We got on really well.

 

BD: What was he doing then?

 

JS: He was doing Theatre Design at St Martin’s. We started doing silly projects together. Our first ever fashion shoot was ‘Robot Ninja Girls’. It was hilariously conceived. Gary did these beautiful drawings of girls with big guns and rockets on their arms, rocket boots and insane heads.  It was the first fashion shoot that we got models from agencies for. It was just the most ambitious thing: we wanted fighting robot creatures with smoke, sets and we decided that we were going to shoot at nine locations on one day, with one assistant. We had no lights and three ill-informed models. The worse point was standing in an underground car park in Shadwell next to this very moody girl wearing cardboard rocket booster boots, a big bazooka arm and refusing to put the big cardboard head on.

 

BD: Did you place the story?

 

JS: Yeah there was a magazine called Less Common, which Matt Irwin did at St Martin’s. It got printed in that.

 

BD: Did it look good?

 

JS: Well it’s not my finest work, but it is quite funny. I mean Gary’s stuff looked amazing. But over the years we started doing more stuff together. The first time we got it really right was when we did little photo sessions with some headpieces Gary had made. We dressed Gary up with paper teeth and big hairdos. It went into a college magazine, and an art director from Mother saw them and Penguin ended up using them for five Kafka book covers.

 

BD: Do you and Gary have work plans in the near future?

 

JS: There are two projects we’d like to work on. One is a move on from the big wicker ‘T’ we did for The New York Times. The other is something with inflatable wind structures. I think that would be quite exciting. We’ve got a bank of projects we want to do, but we have to find the right magazines to do them for.

 

BD: Some of your projects seem quite dangerous, like your flaming wicker T you just mentioned

 

JS: I guess so. My dad once nearly set himself on fire when we shot in a farm in the Cotswolds, he emptied a watering can full of meths all over his jumper. But it is fine, we are careful.

 

BD: All you need is the wind to change…

 

JS: That is true. But it is good to have a little element of danger. With all the stuff I did with Hana for the exhibition it was pretty impressive that we didn’t hurt anyone on that. We had two acrobat guys throwing themselves off a platform into a pool of milk – which wasn’t that deep.

 

BD: Imagine if someone got paralysed.

 

JS: I do think about that. We take every precaution to make it super-safe.

 

BD: Do people sign disclaimers?

 

JS: No! We are really careful. The models are probably the safest people on our shoot.

 

BD: So note all agencies: the models are not at risk!

 

Jacob Sutton’s latest show Bermuda Triangle, a four-person exhibition with Gary Card, Bruce Ingram and Hana Al-Sayed, runs until 19th December, 2009 at Spring Studios.