The artist Mat Collishaw has always used extreme tactics but in his latest show he's found tenderness in cruelty
Mat Collishaw should be a familiar name. He grew up as a card-carrying member of the Goldsmiths gang. He passed all the milestones that put the rest of them on the map. He took part in Freeze, cropped up again for Sensation, was collected by Charles Saatchi and still collaborates with Damien Hirst. For heaven's sake, he even went out with Tracey Emin for five years. And didn't another old boyfriend pretty much start an entire art movement on the strength of that?
So why isn't Collishaw more famous? Why am I visiting him in a rented flat when his mates are buying up rural mansions?
The Emin tag didn't help. The first time that she stayed at his house, Collishaw tells me, was after the Turner Prize ceremony in 1997. They were having a party, and she couldn't stop moaning that she had lost out on the £500 she would have got if she had turned up on some television show. “Everyone kept telling her to shut up,” Collishaw says, “and then the next morning Gillian Wearing phoned and said: ‘Oh, my God! Have you seen the papers?'” It turns out that Emin had stumbled by the television studio after all. She had been so spectacularly drunk that she couldn't remember it, but the rest of the country certainly could.
“It was that drunken appearance that kick-started her career,” Collishaw says. And he got caught up in its cogs. He became known - though he wasn't aware of it at the time - as the boyfriend of Britain's most self-obsessed artist. “She was a bit of an egomaniac,” he admits laconically, and he tells me a story to make his point.
When he heard that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Centre, he texted Emin, who was in a salon having some beauty treatment. They had an SMS conversation that went something like this:
Collishaw: “The face of the world as we know it has changed.”
Emin: “I know. It's so tragic.”
Emin (20 minutes later): “The second one's gone now.”
Emin (three minutes later): “It makes me sick. I f***ing hate them.”
In the afternoon, when Collishaw met Emin, he was surprised that she seemed unperturbed. And then it emerged that she hadn't been talking about the terrorist attack. She had been mourning the pair of eyebrows that a reckless beautician had drastically overplucked.
But all that was over a long time ago. Collishaw has been through an entire marriage and its failure since. And he is making new work. Next week he launches a piece called Deliverance with the Spring Projects gallery. In June it will be on show again as part of a much bigger show with Haunch of Venison, the major London gallery that has just signed him up. The artist, it seems, is being given another chance at success.
Deliverance takes its inspiration from the Beslan school siege in which gunmen took children hostage. He shows pictures of people, dirty, half-naked, crying and holding each other as they walk away from the barrel of a gun and into the barrel of a camera. These pictures are so individual, tender and human and yet they are timelessly haunting. They echo such universal classics as the Pietà or the little girl burnt by napalm.
Collishaw projects them on to a phosphorescent surface that retains the fading after-image long after the projector has swivelled its robotic head onwards to focus on a new site. A world of ghostly memory mingles with a startlingly vivid present.
These pictures, Collishaw says, are about the moral questionability of the media that offer viewers the adrenaline fix that we want from a scene of disaster, exploiting the sufferers so that we can feed our addiction to spectacular visuals. In the forthcoming Haunch of Venison show there will also be images from Victorian child pornography. They are as luridly fascinating as they are heart-rending.
Collishaw definitely knows how to create an impact. He did it quite literally with the work Bullet Hole, which became his signature piece: a gory picture of a gun-wound in the head which, originally shown at the 1988 Freeze exhibition, is now part of the Saatchi collection. Collishaw has a flare for the shock that can be a short-cut to fame. Pornography and the Crucifixion (and sometimes both together) have both served as visual fodder. He has a taste for perversion and vice.
It comes from his childhood, he says. Born in 1966, the second of four boys, he was brought up in Nottingham, but he was hardly a typical council-estate kid. After scraping through his day at school, he may have hung out on the wastelands with his mates, playing with air-guns and ogling porn mags; but at home he and his parents were ardent Christadelphians. Every Wednesday and twice on Sunday, Collishaw was attending the Bible study sessions of a sect that seemed to disapprove of pretty much everything, from female education (his mother had to study in secret) through religious imagery to television.
Collishaw, perhaps inevitably, became fascinated by the forbidden. Even Bruce Forsyth, when seen by a little boy with his nose pressed to the window, could accrue an aura. “I would peep through neighbours' curtains and watch him dancing on the TV in the corner and it would feel like his spirit was trapped in that little glowing box. I would spend hours making my own TV sets out of Weetabix boxes.”
Collishaw eventually got into Goldsmiths on the strength of “a pile of scrappy life drawings”. “It changed my life” he says. It offered him chances - including that of hanging out in the pool room and drinking with such ambitious contemporaries as Damien Hirst, Gary Hume, Sarah Lucas and Marc Quinn.
But he had got off to a false start. He was only 23 when his girlfriend gave birth to a son. While his Goldsmiths mates were all out making their mark, he was back home with bottles and nappies. Maybe he missed the boat. But it probably didn't help that he started making fairy pictures. The artistic climate in the 1990s, he suggests, was all “blood and guts or steel and glass; it was either gory shock or that impersonal sculpture that you don't have to relate to”. But he started making images inspired by the faked Cottingham fairies. However disturbing his little flowerbed scenarios of winged teenaged glue-sniffers, the Victorian aesthetic was hardly fashionable.
And yet Collishaw's work crops up again and again in group shows. It has an immediacy that seizes the attention. His pieces don't need a complicated conceptual support. They speak for themselves. “I've always put him at the very top,” Damien Hirst tells me. “He understands how to connect to your soul and your heart... His work won't allow us to take anything for granted; he shines light into the darkness and finds beauty in the abyss.”
Certainly, his video works - his butterflies fluttering in imprisoning jars; a projection of his own body, breathing and blinking, on to a cross; a picture of Ganymede being snatched by an eagle projected on to the smoke that emanates from a church font (the pagan imagery of abduction puffing up from a Christian instrument of induction) - stir disturbingly mismatched emotions.
Collishaw admits to making the most of attention-seeking tactics. “Enticing little bits of eye-candy or pieces of hardcore pornography - they both work in much the same way,” he suggests. He might create a picture inside a kitsch little snow dome or exploit blatant images of bondage or bestiality. Whichever, the impact is instant. And there's always a twist.
“Images that are purely offensive give you an instant fix,” Collishaw says, “but I want to make pictures that last longer than that. On the surface they shock or seduce you, but I want there to be undercurrents that make you wonder about other implications.”
The cruel and the caring, the poetic and the morbid, the alluring and the repulsive all meet in Collishaw's work. No wonder our responses get all tangled up. But let's hope that this time his path will remain clear.
Mat Collishaw's Deliverance will be on show at Spring Projects, NW5 (020-7428 7159), from April 11
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