You may have seen Thinking Chair. I loaned it to the Arts Council and it travelled round the country for two years. [September 2016–August 2018] But this is how it presents itself. A tangle of Jules Verne machinery – metal spirals, pistons, turntables – activates a complicated arm which moves slowly round. The arm is attached to a tiny yellow chair which seems to have been borrowed from Van Gogh. The chair stands on a rough slab of stone which, given the scale, resembles an uninhabited planet. Guided by a fiendishly clever mechanism, the chair ‘walks’ on its two front legs, empty and alone, making endless circles for no good reason.
When I look at Thinking Chair I think of my own life, so much of it solitary and, for that matter, spent sitting down. There’s something comical about the little chair. Speeded up, it could easily appear in a Disney animation, but this version is strangely poignant.
How I would love to own Ganson’s piece Cory’s Yellow Chair, which explodes and then reconstructs itself, or his haunting and macabre Machine with Abandoned Doll (check them out on YouTube). Ganson’s work is truly the stuff of dreams and it’s utterly unique.