Jim Ramsay

When I was thrown out of architecture school it never occurred to me that this was some sort of cosmic hint. When they let me back in and I managed to graduate, I was nonplussed when a professor told me "we thought you could be an architect, we just didn't know if you wanted to be an architect". In hindsight I know that learning how to build things and knowing how to convey why you want them built that certain way were valuable but no, I really didn't want to be an architect....

But architecture took me to Japan where I started to make the crazy paper models of my youth again and school had taught  me to write down the ideas behind the crazy paper models in my daily journal. Then architecture took me to the Caribbean and introduced me to people who knew that if you were going to stay the course you would have to chart it yourself. Finally it took me to the movie industry, a place where wild ideas are a daily currency and where  stretches of hard work allows you the time and the space to be creative for stretches between jobs. The movies perhaps also presented me with the metaphor at the centre of my work.

So now I have the time, the resources and the inclination to build the alternate universe that presents itself to me on the pages of my sketchbook/journal. If the Walkman or the iPod have provided us the soundtrack to our own personal movies I'd like to think my pieces are the vehicle to engage everyone's personal movie narrator. Just like a movie set they are there to tell a story that is only brought alive by the interaction with the viewer.

The artists I collaborate with must be creating their own story as they work through their interpretation of the tangled chaos I have handed them. Each person that tries to bring their rational view of the world to interpreting the pieces must be telling themselves a story that I hadn't even imagined. And I guess that is what I am trying to accomplish-creating storied objects that allow your inner voice a flight of fancy...

Perhaps there is a special asylum for that sort of thing but as William Heath Robinson once said:
"I really have a secret satisfaction in being considered rather mad."