Artist Ryan Gander on his childhood garage-cum-studio

Number 1, Whitton Drive was the first house on the housing estate to be built. It was the corner plot at the entrance to the block. So when we first moved into that house, my parents bought it from brand new. It was actually the only house standing and every plot around it was still mud with JCBs on. It was much later that I appropriated their garage into my pseudo atelier or pretend studio. It was… It must have been when I was studying art at school, so it would have been GCSE or A level. And of course, we’d go into the classroom at school and we’d make art for our class or study or exams. But I felt like I wanted more than that. So I must have made the studio as a sort of real stamp of authority in everyone’s mind that that’s what I was really going to be and do with my life. So in…I guess it was my studio, but it wasn’t of course, it was just a garage full of junk. And when I think about myself in that garage, the idealized version of reality, the romanticized version of me sitting there, pretending to be an artist, is almost like a television comedy program. Because the actuality of it isn’t my idealized view or memory of it. The actuality of it is there’s probably some nerdy, spotty kid sitting on a plastic box surrounded by gardening tools and mechanical bits off a car with David Bowie playing, smoking a rollie, imagining that they were an artist. And I really like that disparity between fiction and reality, or the imagined and the projected. You know, you get these, like, tangential, pivotal moments in life where we make decisions and they inform our futures. They send us spinning off into trajectories, and there’s millions and millions of trajectories that we don’t ever follow. I always think of that place—that cold garage, holding that cup of fruit tea, and that black cherry tobacco rollie, with David Bowie playing in the background, as a roundabout off which loads and loads of roads go. And I chose the B road, not the motorway.