2nd May 2016

Interview: Space Explorer founder Robin Mellor

– by Milly Burroughs

Take a stroll through Hackney from Thursday 5th May and you might find yourself suddenly transported to the hostile dunes of an American desert. Following a Kickstarter campaign that saw his project Space Explorer successfully raise the funding required to produce its first show, Robin Mellor’s ‘Another Space & Time’ will guide its audience through 15 East London locations. Each location will showcase Robin’s fascinating photography of the Great American Desert as billboard-sized artworks. An app developed for the exhibition will allow each viewer to be immersed in a bespoke soundscape when they reach the GPS zone of each photograph.

Robin Mellor is a London-based portrait, documentary and advertising photographer. Having had his work featured in The Telegraph, Guardian, Independent, Wonderland, Tank and Esquire, Robin founded Space Explorer as a new public art platform to inspire a fresh perspective on the exploration of urban spaces. Ahead of the launch of ‘Another Space & Time’, we spoke to Robin about leaving galleries behind, working with Hackney Council and why virtual reality is the future.

You set up Space Explorer as a creative outlet for the work you are passionate about. Why is it important for you to have this outlet?

It’s so important to have an outlet, I want people to see the work that drives me, I think every creative person does, and to have an outlet that I know I can really have control over, and not have ideas diluted or changed by someone else’s vision, is really important. It’s amazing to be able to get your unfiltered project out and into the world.

Space Explorer was also set up to try and reach as many people as possible, to inspire those who wouldn’t ordinarily think about walking into a gallery. I think it’s important to try and reach out to an audience who aren’t regular art lovers, as well as those who are. We’re becoming ever more compartmentalised as a society, so hopefully with something a bit more democratic, like this project, we can spread ideas around a more diverse slice of society.

Why did you choose Hackney as the location for project? What has it been like working with Hackney Council?

I chose Hackney simply because it’s the place I’ve lived and worked for more than 10 years. I feel a real connection to Hackney, it’s changed so much over the time I’ve been here, and to see it grow and develop for the good, and the bad, has been a real part of my life. The other interesting thing about Hackney is this sort of dual personality it has, its new gentrified creative side and its older underprivileged side. We’re working with the council on this project so we wanted to try to unite these two sides to help them learn from each other within workshops we’ll be running throughout the project.

Hackney Council have been great to work with, they’re so open to creative initiatives and are a real forward thinking and youthful group of people. I particularly have to thank Jenny Leighton who has been absolutely amazing and this definitely wouldn’t have happened without her help.

Does this project represent a departure from more traditional venues, like galleries, housing creative work?

I’m definitely not averse to gallery shows, I love gallery shows, a gallery is just a space that you can turn into whatever your imagination can think up. That said, photographic exhibitions can sometimes be a bit lazy in their vision of what is possible, I think. Photographs are such an amazingly malleable thing, that can be printed in million different ways onto pretty much any surface you can think of, yet most shows just stick to printed paper in a frame. That seems a bit crazy to me.

How does Space Explorer differ from your previous work?

Space Explorer has been a real leap for me. Being a photographer, I was previously just making work. Setting up the Space Explorer platform has been a real education, I’ve learned so much about different aspects that have gone into it. I didn’t really have any idea about how to go about most of the things I’ve done for this project at the start, but just learned as I went, a lot of mistakes later we’ve finally made it!

What are your personal highlights from Space Explorer?

I think the most enjoyable part of setting up Space Explorer, so far, has been getting to collaborate with so many great people. It’s definitely been a real team effort to get everything to this point, pretty much everyone involved has gone way beyond what they should have done, working either for free or at a massively reduced rate. They all believed in the project and could see the potential of what we might be able to create.

Why did you choose the Great American Desert as your subject?

The first time I went to the desert was for a commercial shoot in California, it really struck me straight way that there’s something special about it, it’s a pretty fascinating place and I knew straight away that I wanted to come back to do a personal project about it. It’s got some sort of a draw to it that pulls in really interesting characters. I didn’t go into the project with any preconceived ideas of what it was going to say, but really quickly patterns started to emerge about the significance of the place and how it helped the people who lived there.

Before I started I knew I’d get some interesting perspectives on life, but half thinking a lot of the people I’d meet would be slightly insane. Just a couple of days in I’d completely changed my perception of them. They were living in a seriously harsh environment in (in my opinion) one of the most crazy countries in the world, yet they had an amazing outlook and togetherness that you very rarely find.

What would you like people to get out of Space Explorer?

I’d like people to firstly just get immersed in the world of it, and to take themselves away from their usual day to day life in the city. I’m slightly addicted to This American Life and love nothing more than to go for a run or walk around the city and just get transported to another place and absorbed into a story from half way around the world.

The second thing I’d hope people get out of it is to think about how the perspectives of the people of the desert relate to their own lives. We live in a complete bubble. Although we’re constantly connected to the whole world I think we’re also very cut off from it, we stay in our own little world, living our own lives - which I guess is through necessity, but having these characters transposed onto the everyday streets that we live in will hopefully jog something to connect a little more directly with their stories.

What’s next for you after ‘Another Space and Time’?

Next I’ve got a few plans, I don’t think ‘Another Time & Space’ is necessarily finished, I’d love to travel to some other deserts around the world and carry on the theme, seeing if the things I learned in America carry through to other countries.

I’ve also got plans to keep developing Space Explorer, hopefully taking it to other countries and opening it up to other artists to get involved. I’m really interested in Virtual Reality, it’s such a hot topic at the moment, I really do think it’s going to be the next big revolution. It’s probably the most amazing “fake” experience I’ve ever had, it has the most amazing possibilities for what you can do with story telling and immersive experiences. We’ve got a documentary film project coming up soon that would be great to work with VR with, so fingers crossed this will be my first foray into the next world.